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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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It. Is. Unsustainable. It was never designed to be sustainable. There is no way to „fully fund” the pensions, even if you have 10% ROI. When you have almost the same number of retirees as you do workers, and they are pulling payouts equal to or more than your workforce average salary, you’re in trouble. At best, it is a Ponzi scheme.
Any teacher in the system right now, whether 5 years left or 25 years left, better save and invest as much as possible. There will be no pension for you. This is just the beginning
Maybe only Old Joe can answer this, but when there were pensions for non gov workers, what was the percent of the pension to final pay. Also, non govt pensions probably were not based on final pay ( or last x years) like the gov ones that led to tricks with increases in final years. Also pretty sure no annual increases in the pension.
Wasn’t this what the Tier 2 pension system supposed to do?
The biggest pension problem in Illinois is the issue of funding. The pensions have to be paid so, rather than fund the pension funds, the politicians find all sorts of new things to spend money on such as assorted immigrant spending initiatives, subsidies to Chinese battery makers or the new Medicaid expansion program where we were told there was no way of knowing how much it will cost” Quit spending the money, put the funding where it is due and in that way property tax hikes will be kept much lower.
If the politicians fully fund the pension funds they will have to increase taxes dramatically upwards. The people will revolt and the politicians will pay the price. Don’t look for anything to happen until it is too late for both the government pensioners and the taxpayers.
Fat chance of this happening. The public sector will kill it for sure. Wire Points tries all the time to help, and the ship is sinking faster than ever.
This will be interesting to follow, and hopefully it inspires other communities to do the same. If multiple communities support this and results show clear support, perhaps it becomes a wider issue that state politicians would have to explain their opposition. This will get laughed off in Chicago, Evanston and Oak Park but maybe not many other places?
Wouln’t we all love to vote on another guy’s wages and eventual pension benefits? Is there any question at all as to how this vote will turn out? I don’t think so. Does that make it a slam dunk that existing pension rights are easily transformed to deny much of what they were promised? Hopefully not or why have a contitutional protection for it as we do at present in the first place.
When you sign up for a government job, you should understand that your wages and benefits are ultimately voted on and paid for by the public. Isn’t that exactly what we’ve been told ad nauseum? So why the outrage now?
We’re told that time and time again that the voters have voted for the egregious benefits and that’s just fine because the voters voted for it. So we have to accept it if the voters change and vote the other way because that’s what the voters voted for.
Did you really think that taxpayers would sacrifice their own retirement to fund these overly generous benefits, and there would be no pushback? This is probably just the beginning.