Chicago Is Considering Issuing A Pension Bond – And Taking A Gamble – Forbes

"So here’s the bottom line: the city really has no particularly good options. But the city risks making a bad situation even worse, if it looks for solutions that promise a free lunch rather than making hard choices."
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Poor Taxpayer
5 years ago

Heads I win, Tails you loose. Sounds like a Trump game.
Run for your economic life. Kiss Illinois Good Bye while you can still get out with the shirt on your back.

Riverbender
5 years ago

Who wants to bet that Moody’s and the rest of the rating companies will not rank them as “junk” even though they are junk?

LessonLearned
5 years ago

Liquidate and borrow whatever you can and bet it all on 32 red. (If you loose, blame the closest white guy.)

Governor of Alderaan
5 years ago

There’s no gamble at all. This is risk free. If the plan works then the unions get a pile of money. If it doesn’t work then the taxpayers get higher taxes and the unions still get a pile of money

Poor Taxpayer
5 years ago

Spot on.

Tom Paine's Ghost
5 years ago

Yes. Absolutely right. Chicago bankruptcy now is the only option. Never in any of Chicago’s financial plans is the taxpayer ever protected.

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Mark Glennon on AM560’s Morning Answer: Chicago pension buyout plan mostly shifts debt rather than eliminating it, property tax surge doubles inflation over three decades

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.

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