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.
Hmm, do felons pay attention to laws on the books? No, that’s how they became felons. CWBChicago runs an ongoing series about repeat felons charged with gun crimes and there’s no shortage of perps.
A guy on the internet who notices things, and just released a book called Noticing, frequently opines that there are two kinds of gun control: point of purchase and point of use. Our politicians go after point of purchase control, grabbing guns from otherwise law abiding citizens, believing that it will reduce ‘gun violence’ (as an aside, he’s wrong about this, the goal of point of purchase is to turn the deplorable into a felon). But the other kind of gun control is point of use, which means, controlling people from using the gun. Most shootings, especially in the inner… Read more »