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.
This is total madness. The entire taxpayer-financed program for this has created just 469 jobs at a cost to taxpayers of $650 million. That’s over $1.3M per job, which is criminally stupid. Widely recognized benchmarks for job creation are a fraction of that.
And almost all of you will believe him.