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.
You are right to be focusing on the fraud in the official state numbers. Another site that is putting up the real nummbers and covering the accounting fraud is http://www.statebudgetsolutions.org
Yes, StateBudgetSolutions has done great work on this, as well as its sponsor, Sunshine Review.