-- Connecting the dots between our economy, government and business --
Summary and audio linked here.
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.
Expect no retraction or apology. This what they do.
The state’s existing buyout program for its own pensions is the precedent for Chicago, which should be a warning: Look out for similar exaggerated claims and shoddy analysis.
Full interview and summary linked here.
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“inestimable value” means an incalculable worth — unless you have to pay for it. Let’s ask ourselves: If it burned to the ground would we rebuild it?
The place looks like Azkaban or the MCC! It will evolve into an incomplete eye sore for Jackson Park. When will the arm twisting begin for funding? Any open or implicit reluctance to contribute will be considered racist!
Not surprising. All the momentum for this project was years ago right after Obama left office and Trump won. Every year that passes, Obama’s political influence wanes and leads to more indifference about the Obama era in general. It’s no longer the hip project to attach your name.
Obama knew this. That’s why the project was railroaded through. All the construction delays and fights with the Friends of the Parks (Obama acolytes, no less) have led to this moment.
The plans to build the worlds largest outhouse are now changed. It will be a one-holer, gender neutral.
Just don’t drop your wallet down there!
They should scrap the project and just sell Obama the Metropolitan Correction Center, I mean, it looks just like the Obama Center building plans.
Lol… you are spot – on…!!!
Hey I just thought up a brilliant idea. We can repurpose Soldier Field into the Obama Center.
There Lori, I fixed it for you at no charge.
Why haven’t Oprah, Beyonce, Bill Gates, Bezos, and all the other billionaires they pal around with helped to fund this “library”?
Look up the term boondoggle.
There are a dozen or so billion-dollar Silicon Valley non-profits who could cut a check for remaining amount and it would barely cause a ripple in their portfolios. Strange that they haven’t done so.
Grab your wallets, folks. Taxpayers are already putting in $174 million as we wrote before. Expect them to come back for more.
This is very disappointing.
I really want to see the Obama Hubris Center for Zero Accomplishments completed as a monument to his utter vacuity.
In a perfect world, one would walk through an entrance with digital signs tabulating in real time Obama’s net worth and number of houses, into huge empty rooms displaying all that he accomplished in his Administration About Nothing. In the basement, visitors would gaze from a balcony into a bottomless black abyss signifying all of Obama’s unknown past, which has been disappeared forever, as if it never existed.
Ooh, that’s good. Some imagination into what else it should include is in order.
Few people realize that the Obama Center is NOT a Presidential Library run by the National Archives where all his records are held. His 30 million presidential records will eventually only be available digitally. Get it? No hard copies that can’t be manipulated or hidden. How convenient. But totally expected and fitting from The Man With No Past. I propose that one of the big empty rooms in the new Obama Hubris Center have massive floor to ceiling bookcases on all four walls, but there should only be a single book in the entire room titled President Obama’s Accomplishments. That… Read more »
One possible additional book being Rules for Radicals.
Obama was colloquially called the Deporter-in-Chief for removing (aka deporting) large numbers of illegal aliens.
And for that, he receives one entry in his otherwise empty book of accomplishments. I will give credit where credit is due.
Since some of what he did might be labeled as accomplishments but were not were designed with any lasting permanence, I propose that the Obama Hubris Center be built on a foundation of sand.
Ataraxis, I like your prose
Gotta elevate your game at Wirepoints!
Charlatans like Obama really bug me, he’s nothing more than a skillful alderman out to game the system for money.
Here you had one of the youngest recent presidents, with an opportunity to implement new ideas and policies, and yet his playbook was just a tired retread of FDR. His administration is when the country realized that the Dems are truly out of ideas, hence the Dem pivot to all the outlandish woke garbage.
This is evidence that despite the Biden regime being Obama’s unofficial third term, Obama is not actually in charge. If he were actually in charge (as one theory goes), he’d be selling his influence in exchange for donations, and this foundation would be on better financial footings. Just as the Clinton Foundation Hillary ran while Secretary of State floundered after Hillary lost in 2016, the same is apparent here.
So inevitably, the next question is: if Obama isn’t the defacto head of the Biden Regime, who actually is?
That’s where it should be built “underwater” and the only visitors will be Lloyd Bridges and Jacques Cousteau.