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.
The bigger lesson should be blazing in editorials everywhere: Never, ever let any of today’s progressives anywhere near a checkbook. They are utterly reckless, innumerate and willfully ignorant about finance and economics.