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After $6 billion in COVID money, after over $800 million in city and school property tax increases, this is what we have to show for it,” mayoral challenger Paul Vallas said Wednesday. “...(A) budget deficit of anywhere between half-a-billion and a billion dollars, 2,000 fewer cops on the street, a steady exodus of people from a school system where half the schools are fewer than 50% enrolled, and the same kind of tax-and-waste budgetary practices that we’ve had for the last few decades.”
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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Vallas makes some pretty good and accurate points. He talks like a fiscal reformer, BUT and it’s a big BUT, the socialist city council will eat him alive and spit him out on the sidewalk if he is elected. They have to get their cut of the ciity’s revenue to keep their power. They will be at war with him before he is even inaugurated. Vote for a D, any D,and you will only get more of the same social and city destruction that LL has shifted into high gear during her term.
Because he is speaking to fiscal responsibility, and has limited appeal to certain groups, he stands no chance of being elected. Would be thrilled to be wrong.
Great. However…no mention of public pensions which is the #1 issue confronting IL/Chicago….plus political corruption and political incompetence of a scale unparalleled among the 50 US state (and PR).
If you`ve followed Vallas at all over the years pensions have been and are in his gun sights