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.
It is detrimental to shareholders if public companies in Illinois are not forming a small committee of board members and management to look at the costs/opportunity costs of moving out of state given several adverse scenarios. What is the straw that will break a particular company’s back? For the exchanges, I suppose it is a transaction tax. For someone like Abbot Labs or John Deere, it is not as clear. Exchanges could also throw a shot across the bow by moving some transactions to data centers in places like Dallas.