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 state’s Capital Development Board commissions a study about the effectiveness of labor agreements, and uses a group with leadership tied to organized labor. The results are -get ready for this- labor agreements are really, really good. This is the type of unabashed, circular, I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine sneaky way Illinois Democrats siphon taxpayer money.