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.
These 1% school facilities tax increases have been proposed all over the state. They appear to be instigated by a financial management firm that guides school districts in the campaign (“it’s just a one-cent tax”) then get a cut as they work with the schools in managing the money. The schools are not the ones initially proposing this, it is an outside for-profit company promoting a tax increase for their benefit.
Hmm, is this proposal really for an additional one percent sales tax? For example, a 1 percent increase to a combined sales tax of 9 percent would result in a new tax rate of 9.09 percent. Or are they talking about 9 percent + 1 percent = 10 percent, which is a huge 11 percent increase? The latter is over a 100X greater than the former. I hope the school districts aren’t trying to trick their math-challenged residents.