-- Connecting the dots between our economy, government and business --
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.
SIGN UP HERE FOR OUR FREE WIREPOINTS DAILY NEWSLETTER
Crime Enablers Blame Chicago On ‘Segregation’ That Ended 60 Years Ago, Instead Of The Soft On Crime Policies Of Chicago Democrats
Cops don’t respond to over 400,000 calls many of them to report serious crimes or in progress crimes. Many victims of serious crimes wait hours for a police response and many walk away frustrated. No reports of crime equals drop in reported crimes equals drop in crime rate equals politicians and law enforcement officials to brag about what a great job they’re doing. A total bunch of BS!
***—where inequality is extreme and the affluent live separated from the poor.—***
You mean like the “gated communities” where most of the politicians live…?
Nothing but pompous & pandering bloviating…
What garbage. They insist on focusing on the “long term” so they can ignore the defund the police and woke prosecutor damage. They whine about disinvestment in cities. Even if disinvestment in cities is accurate, if cities want to be recipients of investment then cities must be places worth investing in. Am I going to invest in an urban business so it can be robbed and vandalized? Am I going to invest in a house in the city when my kids can’t go to local crap schools, taxes are high, I have no space, and violence reigns? Investments are fungible,… Read more »
“Investments are fungible, they go where they earn the highest return. Investing in Chicago earns nothing” The communist believes in central planning. Investment shouldn’t be about the highest return on capital, but the highest return on ideology. Investing in Chicago to them returns dividends in political capital with progressive politicians. Most of us obviously don’t believe this nonsense but they do. And many of them run major companies too…..Look at disney’s disastrous year of wokeness. They can’t stop making movies about LBGTB!+Pedos and market filth to little children. This most recent movie strange worlds cost $180M and it bombed this… Read more »
When violence was trending downward a couple years before the pandemic, everyone was bragging how the new social justice programs and platforms were working. Violence is now way up, but those same social justice programs and platforms in place. Either they worked or they didn’t. They didn’t.
“The forces that have left American neighborhoods vulnerable to rising violence are entirely distinct from the people who live in those neighborhoods.” Yeah, right.
Mendacious blather and harrumphery.
Pretends that the trillions of taxpayer dollars invested in the “Great Society” never happened, and that “lack of guvmn’t involvement” caused the collapse of churches, schools and the social/family structure of Chicago’s poor minority neighborhoods that resulted from 60+ years of woke government meddling.
He fails to mention that vibrant black communities existed before social engineering brought Cabrini Green and the projects to Chicago.
And that births to single black mothers were not such a phenomena until Johnson’s Great Society meddled with welfare.
Social engineering supported by the same type of sociologists Mr. Sharkey represents.
Perhaps dropping all this woke nonsense, equity in incarceration, and activism and simply going back to ‘live and let live’ might go further than more government meddling in people’s lives.
Not to mention the indoctrination of the prosperous & successful black families in the early 60’s by white marxist’s that convinced them they were oppressed & aggrieved…
Stunning to read an article in which the writer assigns agency to a neighborhood, rather than the people living in it.
He’s a sociology professor. He’s not very smart. What do you expect?
I was a Sociology major, when I went to college after the Army.
50 years ago. Whole different discipline back then.
Yes, the first generation of neoconservatives mainly made up of sociologists, political scientists and the like. Many Republicans were really impressed: “Wow, now we have a whole bunch of real intellectuals on our side.” I think they they meant policy-oriented thinkers like James Q. Wilson and Irving Kristol.
A variety of Magic Dirt theory.