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
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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.
Blatant theft of public lakefront parkland. Whatever happened to “Forever open clear and free”? Barack Hussein Obama could easily have purchased adjacent empty land to build this pompous monstrosity but instead the chosen to steal from Chicagoans of today and future generations forever. Absolutely appalling, disgusting and shameful.
Horrible This in my backyard Jackson Park. It was first presented as a traditional ex presidential library , but that narrative was soon abandoned – there s to be no library or even books ( is this taken from a Chris Rock comedy act that B African Americans don t read books ?) We in Hyde Park already had a perfectly decent Museum of Black African American history and culture – the Dusable Museum – which is a modest scale for a museum not a 23 story sky scraper that looks like a cement parking lot . This OPC is… Read more »