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.
Nope. All they have to do is make significant cuts to pensions and health care benefits, and you’ll have no more population decline. If you think that’s heartless, it’s not. Cut the pensions and benefits by 50 percent, and those retirees would still have better retirement packages than most American workers.