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.
And the chart that shows the two proposed states income and assets fails to show the expense broken down in a similar fashion.
Indeed the marriage and divorce scenario seems to fit. As it is now downstate Illinois is not much more than a host for the tic some call Chicago.