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.
Considering a large chuck of Chicago voters will be collecting a city pension, what can they say? Pay cuts to make pension payments?
They’ll say the same thing we hear from all the other politicians without a backbone: Pensions are a promise.