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.
Pension crisis? What pension crisis? We’ve got so much money we can throw away hundreds of millions. Plus how are we supposed to fill the pockets or friends and relatives who will slide envelopes stuffed with cash to us politicians