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 top state university retirement system (SURS) pension is now over $600,000 annually.
With the 3% compound COLA, the annual pension payout will increase to over $1M in 18 years with a cumulative payout during that period of over $14M.