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 fact of the matter is that the exodus will look a lot like Michigan or Connecticut. Slow, middle class exodus as college kids leave and don’t return, retirees leave and don’t come back, college grads who lived in Lakeview during their dating years return ‘home’ to whatever state that is. Virtually all my post-college friends from out of state have left. They all went home after getting married and having kids. Too expensive, too liberal of a state, even for upper middle class educated liberals. 25 years from now the state will be unrecognizable, with a vibrant rich urban… Read more »