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 quarter of every dollar of tax from legal weed will slosh around, going mostly to politically-connected “non-government” (laughs sardonically) organizations run by friends, family and campaign contributors of (mostly democratic) politicians.
It’s a slush fund.
Weed TIF.