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.
This is more of a ‘look over here, asking the State to bail out us’ while at the same time, late on some friday afternoon in the middle of December, she’ll release her real plan, which increases property taxes, services tax and a city income tax that applies to suburban commuters.