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.
His frustration can be explained by the fact that they are all Democrats. The inter-generational poverty is exactly what both the voter and the politician want. No one is stopping anyone from trying to break out of poverty. They want to be poor. I have family members that live off SSDI and it’s practically pennies, but they make it work, because living of pennies for free, without working, is nearly always better than actually getting a job and going to work. Trying to understand it through the lens of a self-sufficient independent government fearing conservative is not going to get… Read more »