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 didn’t prove this statistically, but it seems the more a state mismanages its taxpayer revenues, the more fiscal cliffs it experiences. Hence, Illinois’ new slogan: “Land of Fiscal Cliffs.” I went kind and gentle, leaving out words like “corruption,” “greed,” and “poor financial management skills.”