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.
“Metra’s ridership has dropped 97%.” How long will this take to come back? 3 months, 12 months, 3 years, 12 years, 3 decades? Those trains are packed all day every week day. There’s no way to solve that problem other than to double the trains to give people twice as much space, and that still won’t be enough. There aren’t enough train cars avaialble to run that kind of schedule. our leaders have burnt to the ground, in a figurative second Great Chicago Fire, the last good thing Chicago had – the booming business district downtown, and I’m sorry my… Read more »