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.
Want more money for educating kids, repeal via constitutional amendment the pension sentence added to the state constitutional in 1970 and begin clawing back pension and retiree healthcare benefit hikes since 1971.
The focus of public education in Illinois is compensating powerful voting blocks, not educating children.
Public education in Illinois is a political mess with monopoly school districts and monopoly unions.