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.
The premise in this article that the SALT deduction benefited the wealthy is false. The top 1% were caught in the alternate minimum tax (AMT) and were never really able to claim it. The primary beneficiaries were the upper-middle class.