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.
I pay $6,900 in property taxes on a $157K value here in Rockford. Our homes have become ATM machines for all the taxing bodies. High taxes robs us of increasing home values. Many of the properties here still have the same value of the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. Tax’s of over $49,000 on a $1 million value are ludicrous. We need a 1% hard cap values on residential and 2% on commercial properties. Taxing bodies need to live within their means not ours.