-- Connecting the dots between our economy, government and business --
Summary and audio linked here.
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.
Full interview and summary linked here.
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Charging 9% on a kid or dad wanting to watch a movie is chump change. The city can collect literally billions of dollars a year by taxing businesses that install their data centers in the cloud; either at Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure or in Google Data Center. Whenever a business spins up a new virtual server they can tax the data egress, the data transfer is so large that even a small tax here would solve the pension debt. Businesses no longer invest into their own data centers as much due to the capital investment involved, when they could… Read more »
Earth to Rick: Don’t you think even more businesses would flee Illinois if they tried that?
Of course, I’m just pointing out the hypocrisy. All data, all transactions, all human knowledge flows over the internet network. The politicians still choose to hit up families. And it’s because that’s all they see, literally they are unaware of just how much cloud data flows in industry so they go after a kid downloading a Sony game. They can get billions from all the “other” data, just taxing a small car company like Teslas connected vehicle data alone would generate more revenue than taxing super Mario downloads.
To me, that’s akin to an oxygen tax, how much we breath in and out would be monitored and then taxed. Don’t tell any democrats, I don’t want to give them any ideas.
But I do predict:…..Toll booths on sidewalks in Chicago. Coming soon to a bankrupt city soon!