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.
Illinois has a 5% unemployment rate, higher than the national average and almost double that of our surrounding states. We have job openings in mass all over the state. Instead of pushing for more help out of the government for families “struggling” let’s get people back to work. The state gets an additional benefit of taking in more tax dollars to help out JB’s lack of leadership.