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.
Alaska, a solidly red state, decided to go to ranked choice voting for the 2022 election, after a Democrat ballot initiative that passed by 3,000 votes. And guess what? For the first time in generations, ranked choice voting produced a Democrat for Alaska’s Congressional Rep. Amazing how that works, right? Alaska turned blue after ranked choice voting!