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.
A silly suggestion meant to appear that they are doing something to rein in spending. There is no logical reason to use growth in median personal income as a measure to cap government spending. It sounds like they are just trying to evade the obvious cap on spending, which is the amount of revenue taken in.