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.
A tax on AWS, AZURE, GOOGLE data center hosting would bring in billions in revenue a year. However many companies of all sizes would leave the state. Cloud resources are a huge augmentation to many company data centers now, maintaingin your own DC is expensive. A tax on such services would kill any price advantage.