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
9 Comments
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.
More and more businesses are going to leave. Taxes make them uncompetitive in the national market place. The HUGE PENSION obligation is only growing larger and larger. No hope for Illinois taxes doing anything but going much higher. The public sector has destroyed Illinois for generations to come.
“Illinois lost 2,616 businesses to other states from 1994-2023, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows. For most of that time, the average loss was 65 businesses per year. The rate started accelerating significantly in about 2017 and has tripled since the pandemic.”
Would the last employer to leave please turn out the lights?
The IL pols have been in deep thought about how to reverse this trend. One solution may be to increase taxpayer subsidies to keep businesses in IL.
We have the finest financial minds available to run our state.
These are JB the Hutt’s “success stories”. Praise be to the Hutt.