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.
That CHI has a 21 member school board, three times as many aldermen than required, a +100 man police detail for it’s mayor in a city with half empty schools of uneducated students and residents clawing over each other’s bodies to get out tells us a lot.