-- 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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Public transportation invites crime, encourages gross displays of low class behavior, gives immigrants an excuse to avoid adapting to the American way of life, and deprives many aspiring businesses of countless opportunities.
No wonder the left wants to build more of it.
agreed. if they like riding buses so much, they should just go back to mexico.
They should go back to Mexico even if they don’t like riding buses.
d.o., your statement is a gross misrepresentation of the facts.
The people befouling our once-great city might just as easily be from Venezuela or India, for example.
Preach, Mr. Sohnke! (Love your website, too!
“With the Regional Transportation Authority (RTA) currently facing a $730 million budget shortfall in 2026, Illinois lawmakers are searching for answers.” – Kevin Bessler, Stenographer Du Jour What an insult to the taxpayer. The shortfall happened in 2020 and Chicago’s transit agencies made few substantive changes since then, choosing instead to run empty buses and trains primarily for the benefit of agency employees, even buying a decrepit warehouse in Homewood and pretending that Metra employees were fixing it up just to keep them on the payroll. Uncle Fed imprudently stepped in and fed truckloads of cash into these agencies’ coffers.… Read more »
Our metro area transportation system was designed over 150 years, from the great fire until today, to transport workers to/from the loop. The trolleys and elevated all went downtown, as did bus routes, our diagonal arteries (former indian trails) all begin downtown and our highways mostly all go through downtown. The car dependent suburban sprawl was built around that. Which is why 53 ends at Lake-Cook Road, the Elgin-O’Hare doesn’t go to Elgin or O’Hare, and so on. It’s a great loss to lose our Loop-centric mass transit system but that system is antiquated and out-dated, and quite frankly, very… Read more »
Not so much ‘designed’, more like evolved. Chicago’s central business district emerged from the Chicago Fire as an even more attractive place to be. Companies wanted to locate there due to its central hub location. People and materials were shipped in and out daily, mostly by rail. Steam railroads used Chicago as the main dividing and interchange point between east and west, making Chicago into America’s rail hub. Railroad lines radiated outwards from the rail-crowded industrial southern shore of Lake Michigan to the suburbs up north that smelled less of industry and more of freshly folded money. Downtown, horse and… Read more »
The new agency should be called the ,
“ Metropolitan Rip-off Authority “,
The new motto “ we will never ever be on time”.
New signage-Please take some bandages
From one of our new dispensers, we don’t need to clean up more blood.
Dorval Carter, at 375 K(?) a year salary doesn’t seem to be underfunded.