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.
He might be a better pundit than mayor. Hopefully he provides something more substantive than the talking points memo from the DNC that instructs them to repeat some version of “orange man bad” at every opportunity.