-- 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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Interesting how the Journal Star’s Editorial Board (which is to say Gatehouse Media’s New York Corporate Board Room) makes much about raises for municipal and county employees, and says nothing about raises for Illinois’ government employee union members – SEIU and AFSCME in particular. Governor Tax Cheat’s been lighting that candle at both ends with a blowtorch since taking office. Stonewalling any discussion of the unsustainable costs of “constitutionally protected” state employee retirement benefits that have created the problem, while at the same time shoveling money into union coffers with obscene raises, accompanied by bribes-camoflauged-as-back-pay to insure that SEIU and… Read more »
The Illinois way, you and me don’t matter
Pay raises when so many are being let go from their jobs?
People are wondering where their next meal is but the government wants to give out pay raises?
That is just wrong.
Greedy people have no conscious or shame.
at one point I worked for three yrs without a pay raise. It is not a right it is a privilege. I also have to make sure that I have enough money for when things happen to me and my family. I am not riding on the coat tails of tax paying citizens.