Audio: Wirepoints’ Mark Glennon says Chicago pension buyout plan mostly shifts debt rather than eliminating it, property tax surge doubles inflation over three decades – Chicago’s Morning Answer
April 3, 2026
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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.
Expect no retraction or apology. This what they do.
The state’s existing buyout program for its own pensions is the precedent for Chicago, which should be a warning: Look out for similar exaggerated claims and shoddy analysis.
Illinois lost another 54,000 tax filers and dependents, net, according to the IRS. Since 2000, fleeing taxpayers have taken $94 billion of annual adjusted gross income with them.
“Rah rah, Chicago!” as it hemorrhages tax payers and businesses. USA Today is yet another leftist bird cage liner masquerading as a news outlet.
Those of you who live there have proved to the rest of us that you do not have any central nervous system. No brains or spines seem to be the norm. The stupe who “wrote” this article points to bread and circuses and gives short shrift to the crime, poor services and high taxes.
Those who post comments like this, unable to resist the display of their own superiority over the rest of us, behave suspiciously like the arrogant leftists they supposedly fled. Apparently elitist arrogance recognizes no boundaries.