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.
That’s fitting there will be no layoffs of Cook County employees, because we know they’re all so gainfully employed. It would be cool to get some experts to evaluate Cook County and City of Chicago jobs to figure out how many positions could be consolidated to ease taxpayer burden. Does such an independent, evaluative function already exist?
Guess who’s running for Mayor next time, this is multiple years now.