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.
As the article suggests, I don’t think we’ll ever find out how many billions of dollars of “COVID relief” – PPP loans, unemployment benefits, Medicaid waiver exceptions, student loans – were spent on fraud, waste and abuse. No politician of any political party, nor any of the Federal or state “swamp creatures,” have any real interest in exposing just how badly managed all of this was. They all enriched themselves, bought votes and gained influence by shoveling buckets full of taxpayer dollars into who-knows-who’s pockets and bank accounts. None of them have any interest in illuminating this because none of… Read more »