Chicago’s political leadership is floating a pension buyout program as evidence it is seriously addressing the city’s thirty-six-billion-dollar unfunded pension liability, but Mark Glennon, founder of the Illinois policy research organization Wirepoints, said that the proposal moves debt from one column to another rather than reducing it, and that the broader fiscal picture facing the city continues to deteriorate across every measurable dimension. Audio here.
We definitely need to be more like Florida. They get by with 90% less school district for 800,000 more students. How do they do that. And here’s the real kick in the teeth. They do it with no state income tax and property taxes that are half of ours.