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.
Ha! Blaming online for the closure of stores in Springfield. Springfield, like the rest of Illinois outside of handful of pockets, is kind of a dump. There’s no growth, incomes are flat, population is declining. Some smaller metro areas in the country can’t build fast enough to accommodate the growth. Here, not so much.