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Summary and audio linked here.
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.
Expect no retraction or apology. This what they do.
The state’s existing buyout program for its own pensions is the precedent for Chicago, which should be a warning: Look out for similar exaggerated claims and shoddy analysis.
Full interview and summary linked here.
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Residential property taxes are pretty low in Chicago. She should just jack those up to the south suburban rates, problem solved. One tax not mentioned is a tax on data egress from cloud data centers at Microsoft azure, Amazon AWS, and oracle. That would literally pull in billions with all the companies using cloud data centers now instead of their own on premises data centers. Thinking of things to tax is extremely easy to do. Cutting expenses is hard, she could try that too.
Interesting no mention from mr martirie about pobs as the majic cure? What happened ralph?
I also find it interesting Martire refers to the commuter tax and real estate transfer taxes as “gimmicks”. My guess is that he understands that with these gimmicks people and jobs will migrate from Chicago, but that he cannot explicitly say so because he would have to concede that tax hikes are not exogenous to economic productivity, a tough issue for progressives to swallow. And it would move him away from his static view of Chicago’s broken economy, where comprehending that doing even more of the same will result in dismal outcomes seems to escape him. In any event, no… Read more »
Martire sees these as gimmicks because they distract from his main goal of implementing a graduated tax. Once that passes, he’ll be on board for the city/commuter income taxes.