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.
The new reality is, the longer we kick the can down the road the greater the likely hood that we the people will never have to make good on the rich promises the politicians made to themselves and the unions who put them in office. It is to the taxpayer’s advantage simply to fight every tax increase and simply let the retirement system and healthcare system for retirees implode. At that point we can trim the pension and healthcare to modest levels.
Nice of the Trib to print this after the election. They were late to the party-and they should be doing continuous exposes on the pension debt showing where all the bodies are buried. Big numbers don’t cut it. This has Madigan/Cullerton fingerprints all over it.