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.
Corruption in Asia consists largely of rent-seeking by public officials from police officers to judges to government officials. When I asked a lawyer in Country X about the legal profession there, he shared that most problems can be solved short of hiring a lawyer. However, if a JUDGE needs to be bribed, that’s when you hire a lawyer. The larger the number of government hurdles that must be jumped, the greater the number of opportunities for rent-seeking. While a young lawyer, I once represented a business opening a branch in Chicago and thought I could handle the property tax angles… Read more »