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.
Crazy enough, the overall trend seemed to be that middle and upper middle class suburbs increased in population (my own upper middle class suburb grew more than average) while the working class and lower class suburbs shrank, some quite significantly too.