Audio: Wirepoints’ Mark Glennon says Chicago pension buyout plan mostly shifts debt rather than eliminating it, property tax surge doubles inflation over three decades – Chicago’s Morning Answer
April 3, 2026
9 Comments
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.
Expect no retraction or apology. This what they do.
The state’s existing buyout program for its own pensions is the precedent for Chicago, which should be a warning: Look out for similar exaggerated claims and shoddy analysis.
Illinois lost another 54,000 tax filers and dependents, net, according to the IRS. Since 2000, fleeing taxpayers have taken $94 billion of annual adjusted gross income with them.
I am not certain how to understand this because didn’t LBJ declare a war on poverty in 1964? Does this mean his programs that created massive spending programs in existence to this day have not worked? So I guess we are to believe that revving up the engines to deliver even more of the existing failures will give positive results…and the we wonder why we have the problems that we do.
“ Bu .. bu.. but blue states subsidize red states with the welfare money they give them!” Not a peep out of that crowd while roughly a third of IL is struggling like Cairo. And what about all the money Pritzger says we have for illegals, etc. More smoke and mirrors from the largest Marxist operative in the Midwest.