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.
People don’t learn from the past. Watch the vids on you-tube about the Mississippi Bubble in France in 1719. France was broke so banker John Law had an idea–print more money. Since there wasn’t enough gold to back up all that money, he told people to buy shares in Louisiana. The scheme blew up because Louisiana was a worthless swamp. Calif. needs to print around $1 trillion to pay pensions.