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.
The reality is that most ‘migrants’ are already working. Albeit under the table, or, worse, using your social security number. And guess what? You’ll never know about it either. It’s in protected government databases. The IRS and LE knows who has been using your social security number. And it’s against the law for them to tell you who else is using it too.
Great. Where are the illegals going to work – there are virtually no factories left in Chicago? So some illegal cheat, who is likely a member of a major Mexican or Venezuelan gang, will be along-side in a restaurant, hotel, theater / stadium in the city. I do not view that as a smart setting to place my family in – I would pay to avoid that situation.