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Summary and audio linked here.
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.
Full interview and summary linked here.
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Governor William J. Le Petomane:
Holy underwear! Sheriff murdered? Innocent women and children blown to bits? We’ve got to protect our phoney-baloney jobs, gentleman! We must do something about this immediately! Immediately, immediately! Harrumph, harrumph!”
“Brad Halbrook (R-Shelbyville). ‘We know property taxes are too high. You can probably pull 10 people in and by tomorrow morning have an answer to what needs to be done here to reform this system.'”
OK, Rep Halbrook, how ’bout you get those ten people and help them come up with a recommendation? Recognize that it’ll have to get thru the legislature, and signed by the gov., and maybe require amendment to the state Constitution and/or courts. What do those ten people suggest?
60 to 70% of your property taxes go to the local school district. Districts have been shown to be ineffective based on a number of measurements. Their results are not worth the costs. $25K in annual costs to teach a kid in Illinois is obscene and is in the Private/parochial school range of tuition. The number of school districts, the duplication of management positions, the inefficient management and no accountability and of course the Unions have allowed this to be completely out of control. Consider a person I know. She has worked in School Districts administrative departments as a finance… Read more »
Large percentages of Illinois kids cannot read or do basic math. They graduate high school and are effectively illiterate and unemployable. For this honor taxpayers are billed $25,000 per student per year. This is your property taxes at work. Now lets talk pensions. People who produce nothing tangible are living high off your real estate taxes to the tune of 3% annual increases for the rest of their retired life. What do non government serfs get? Well you get a 401k that is savaged by the stock market every few years. “oh ye suckers”
A study will benefit consultants and cost taxpayers. Whatever the consultants’ fees, nothing will change. Illinois leads the country downhill toward an eventual trainwreck. Voters are either ignorant or obsessed by a single issue and I fear the result will be yet more income and wealth redistribution and increased polarization. Electing Harris won’t work because the measures backed by the left will destroy wealth. However, if the result is Democrat control of the executive and legislative branches, many will be scalded to death by the steam. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BC5mB8v_Brc How long did it take to destroy Venezuela? Cuba? Post-earthquake Haiti? The recent… Read more »
https://www.kiplinger.com/taxes/will-florida-property-tax-be-eliminated
There is PLENTY of right-sizing to do in Municipal and School District budgets – low hanging fruit much it. Property taxes could be reduced immediately by cutting back on the pork pie spending. That is the root of the property tax problem – out of control municipal and school spending. I mean good luck – can’t even get the pension spiking outlawed or the double and triple pension dipping.
Wow what genius. Democrats will commission another study and shell out to one of their cronies. The study will come back with the great revelation that property taxes are too high and the solution is to raise other types of taxes. No mention of cutting costs or eliminating waste. Then the democrats can say to their slaves, “Look we did a study and low and behold, the study says we need a graduated income tax.” When do you realize that the system is utterly and completely broken. If the state and the city were cancer patients, the diagnosis would be… Read more »
Your comment reminds me: wasn’t there supposed to be an IL property tax study not long ago? What were the results of that study?
It must not have come the conclusions they wanted…
Thus a new study is needed…
Another reform would be to effectively police and enforce bad actors receiving property tax exemptions as ‘non-profit orgs’.
No Illinois official agency policed or enforced Dolton failure to comply with Statutory requirements for annual financial filings (municipalities and other taxing bodies are ‘required’ by law to file financial statements…but now look at what is happening in Dolton/Super-Mayor Tiffany Henyard, no filings since 2022).
Similarly, nobody seems to do the job in Illinois of policing and enforcing bad actors violating rules of compliance with standards legally required for ‘Not-For-Profit’ status.
Respectfully Susan, you cannot reform a body that is rotten from the core out. You are putting a band aid on a sucking chest wound.
I would support tax policy which removes ‘tax-exempt’ status from ALL entities, including University Endowment Funds, All organized religions, All NGOs including but not limited to those engaged in fomenting violent illegal activity, and ‘Foundations’ which are vehicles for Clinton-esques to deduct private jet travel to Davos to virtue signal concern for global warming, and above all: “NFP”-status Hospitals which flout the rules with transparent workarounds of unenforced ‘safeguard laws’ supposedly requiring them to ‘give back to the community’ (and are granted anti-competitive monopoly status, ensuring artificially high prices for medical provision). If ‘charity’ were taxable, Generosity will either continue… Read more »
They can study all they want but until spending cuts are made taxes will not be cut.
this is specifically about property taxes.
So they lower one tax to hike another doesn’t sound like relief to me…just sayin
Right. Thousands of bloated government offices in Illinois need more and more feeding from residents. Are there any mechanisms in place to control runaway spending? Also, how’s that initiative going to eliminate townships?
You might want to look at BLS Household Expenditures Surveys, see the percentages of mean/median household incomes and the percentage of those incomes spent on different categories. Property tax expenditures in America are around 4% of hh income across all quintiles, all geographical regions measured. In Collar County Illinois, this percentage is around 10%. Other State income taxes can be tinkered with: ordinary income can be shifted to tax-deferred retirement, or capital gains-based comp, or untaxed ‘health insurance’. Sales taxes can be controlled by taxpayer spending less. 5% flat tax in Illinois is not lower than most of America. But… Read more »
Spot on. It’s awful.
In terms of physics, ‘escape velocity’ can not be reached, when the prices of domicile everywhere else rises faster than your own.
Another reform is to shift OPEB liability to become an obligation of the State.
2 immediately available specific fixes involve TIF reform: A hard limit on the percentage of EAV which can be tied up in TIF at any time. Starting with initial projects (geographical areas defined by a narrow group of self-interested municipal officials), the scope of what properties may be included in TIF can have a hard limit of EAV. If EAV (taxable, that is: non-TIF-frozen-assessment values) grows, more TIF can be done. If not, no more TIF. (This is like the Statutory limit on school debt as a function of EAV). Municipal indebtedness for TIF should be limited the same way,… Read more »
By any chance do you know how much money is diverted into TIF’s in your area from the cost basis when they were started? The increase in home prices recently due to lower home supply must be larger. Simply what was the EAV at the start of the TIF to what the EAV is now. That would give us an indication how much is diverted into basically political slush funds. Have the TIF’s increased new construction or just the increase from existing properties? Don’t forget that with PTELL the taxing bodies will never get less than was levied the year… Read more »