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.
I know this not a PC thing to say, but I’m not a big fan of charity like this. I have family members and friends who visit food pantries. If not for the food pantry, I’d be paying for them out of my own pocket, and I too would eventually end up at the food pantry myself. They are all enormous people, of large size, who eat a lot, frivolously spend away every windfall they’ve ever received from settlements, lottery winnings, inheritances and tax refunds. As one sage and wealthy relative of mine once told me, never give that half… Read more »
Many taxpayers resent carry the burden of indiscriminate public assistance but would like to help those who need or deserve it. I go through a similar analysis while considering public pensions of full-time long-service teachers. A few of them perhaps deserved their final salary but there is no reliable system to evaluate them. The union with its seniority rules makes evaluation impossible. An associated problem is that it is impractical to have governments or charities make subjective judgments about who deserves a large salary or who has been a spendthrift. Can you imagine the size of the social worker army… Read more »