-- 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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This is a consumer tax not a true tax on cpu and data storage in the cloud. If the city wanted to it can tax that which would literally generate billions In revenue per year. Then you would see business scream! Amazon web services, Microsoft AZURE or Google clod services tax would be huge. Companies run many systems there now rather than investing in their own expensive data center build outs.
Of course every business would leave Chicago, but for a while it would generate 10’s of billions in revenue if you taxed every byte of data egress.