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.
Actually it’s over half, according to a report I was reading last week. 53% of every education dollar goes to pensions, with the remainder going to education. Pretty sad that less than half of each dollar goes to actually educating students.