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 new CTU contract wii make the pension hole even bigger. That is common in Illinois. Money which could go to fund pensions is used for salary and current benefit hikes. Then the unions, employees, and retirees complain the employer is not making its full pension contribution. Doubling down, legislative pension benefit hikes to underfunded pensions happened repeatedly after the pension sentence was added to the Illinois state constitution on December 15, 1970. That practice is then minimized by Eric Madiar, by not starting his pension analysis in 1970, thereby reducing thecompounding effect of benefit hikes. If protecting pensions was… Read more »