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 often wondered why a certain grocery store chain near me had a habit of hiring the mentally challenged as baggers, cart gatherers, etc. I surmised that they were receiving some sort of government grant to do so. Now we know why, and why we probably won’t see the happiest, hardest working employees of the grocery store chain around for much longer.