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
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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.
If Illinois does not pay for new businesses, they will not get them. It makes Zero economic sense to open a business in Illinois. Now for the funny news, the other businesses are paying for this, and they are leaving because of the high taxation. This kind of program is destroying business in Illinois for the long run. For every new business they lose a few. How about having a system that keeps existing businesses and encourage new businesses to open. Never going to happen, the public sector pension obligations are far too high to end high taxation.
So the $5 million is about $140K per employee. Illinois taxpayers are literally paying the wages of the workers that drew the short straw and have to come to Illinois. Combined with the other giveaways in the article, taxpayers are on the hook for more than $500 million likely with little return to the communities or tax base. And it is just one more touted supercomputing site without the infrastructure to back it up. Total costs will be way more than just the published incentives.
Woo hoo. A whole entire school bus of jobs.