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.
“The law has actually worked out fairly well,” said DuPage County State’s Attorney Bob Berlin. Yes, but only in the sense of unintended consequences. The purpose of the law was to free everybody but in practice, conservative areas tend to use the law to detain everyone. We’ll see how long this goes on for. The appellate court mostly upholds these detentions because what appellate court judge wants to be known as the judge that freed a murder suspect who went on to commit more heinous crimes. My guess is that within the next year or two, as these cases make… Read more »