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.
Essentially, they are resurrecting the just-recently abolished Employers’ Expense Tax (head Tax) and rebranding it under The Responsible Business Act. I suppose the tax could go towards the unemployment benefits of the folks formerly employed by those responsible businesses.