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
9 Comments
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.
Those who insist upon sustainability-focused investments are the real losers, as demonstrated year-after-year, in poor results.
High interest are killing all the grifter Green scams, every single one, yet Illinois is going to double down on the Green boondoggle. The only thing not sustainable to the State treasurer is the taxpayer’s money.
Maybe our brilliant Treasurer ought to read a business newspaper once in a while to see the disastrous returns coming out of all these wacky sustainable companies. Solar companies of all types are filing for bankruptcy. The wind electric generation business is a shambles with projects facing huge overruns or being outright cancelled all over the place. Demand for EVs is collapsing. Goodbye to lots of taxpayer dollars with these ill advised investments.
Go ahead and invest using your political agenda as a guide. It is a guaranteed way to generate an underperforming portfolio.
What a bunch of gobbledygook and gibberish.