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.
So an extremely large tax increase using rates of 7.5% to nearly 10% on taxable income over $300K only generates the same amount of revenue as a 0.5% increase would on the current flat rate for all income? Wow, if there ever was a wake-up call of how deep we are in the abyss, this is it.