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Summary and audio linked here.
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.
Full interview and summary linked here.
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According to the Cook County Recorder, the homeowner gave a mortgage for $200,000+ as recently as 2015. But they bought the house 29 years ago for $100,000.
Sylvia isn’t being tax out of her home – she cash out refinanced herself out of her home!
It’s her mortgage payment she can’t afford, not the taxes. She’s paying over $1,000 a month in principal and interest every month when the house should have been paid off completely by now.
Yep. Instead if being an adult and living within her means, she just borrowed, borrowed, borrowed.
They literally flushed $200,000 in equity down the toilet – on top of the hundreds of thousands in interest they’ve paid on the cash out refinances over the previous 29 years. And now she’s crying about a $200 a month tax increase. Really? Really? What kind of journalism is this? The tax increase from $3,700 to $6,000 is newsworthy in and of itself. But the sob story about being priced out of her home because her taxes went up $200 a month is literally a fake news narrative, right up there with Covington High School racists and the ‘hands up,… Read more »
A friendly reminder Fred does not pay state income taxes on his teacher pension, which is $10,000 above the median income of the average Logan Square household. By progressive standards, he should carry more of the property tax burden anyways since he also gets a senior exemption on his home and the automatic 3% COLA increase on his pension probably covered the tax increase anyway. But like his progressive co-horts, his favorite person to tax is #SomeoneElse. And wouldn’t “the idea of capping the property taxes of long-term homeowners in gentrification-threatened neighborhoods” unjustly benefit the current homeowners whose property values… Read more »
And good luck posting a comment or criticism on his site, which is an emblematic story in itself. Pravda tolerates no dissent. Yet Klonsky has a huge following among current and retired public teachers. A free marketplace of ideas is as anathema to them as other markeptplaces.