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 Illinois tax-rate increases won’t stop at 7.95%.” Last sentence says it all. If a graduated tax is so all fired important, make the rates part of the constitutional amendment as well. That way it would take another con con to change them.