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.
Electricity and land taxes are expensive in Illinois which are by far the two most expensive costs for a data center. There’s only a skeleton crew of people working in a fully operational data center because the temperature is very hot and all they do is swap out hardware. Data centers can be anywhere connected by our massive infrastructure of fiber optic cable. Really, what difference does it make if the data center is located in Chicago or not.
Chicago is open for a lot of things, but business, alas, isn’t one of them. We were using the term “Silicon Prairie” many years ago when I ran the Midwest Council of the American Electronics Association. Unjustified boosterism.