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.
I would like the statements to be true for healthy employment. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics at the end of December 2021 ranked Illinois 40th with a 5.1% unemployment. Worse than our surrounding states. I wonder why the 2021 data was omitted from the chart.