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.
I’d like to kindly remind folks that Illinois was a free state. A Republican president from Illinois (who like DJT did not win with a plurality) issued a proclamation freeing all slaves, none of whom lived in Illinois. Illinois sent many union men to their death to free the slaves. Illinois did not have Jim Crow, nor did it have the KKK, or lynchings, or systemic racism separating the races. It really makes zero, yes zero, sense for a city like Evanston to talk about reparations.
The party of the same KKK, Jim Crow laws, Woodrow Wilson, and LBJ (vile racists both) seems far more obsessed with race than their opponents, whom they constantly accuse of racism. And people fall for it. Every…single…time.