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.
Perhaps the strategy is to force municipal bankruptcy. Under such a strategy, protesting cost increases is counterproductive.
Both paths end up with the same outcome, higher and higher taxes paid by the private sector. Result will be more and more people leaving the state. Illinois is being destroyed from within. When someone takes too large of a slice of pie, someone else gets a smaller one.