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.
Is this the same Moody’s that gets hired directly by the Pritzker administration; gets paid hundreds of thousands of dollars each year by the state, by its public colleges and universities, and by all the state bonding authorities run by Pritzker appointees? What a coincidence that they bend a little bit to give a little space on these ratings. Can anyone spell “CONFLICT OF INTEREST”?