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.
MPEA has long been cashbox for rewarding political patronage. There’s also history of stacking employees into two categories: those who do the actual “work”, be that as it may, and those who don’t actually even need to “work”, because the job’s the reward, with salaries that grossly exceed private-sector pay-scales.