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Senior mayoral adviser Jason Lee said the same alderpersons who complain that “hope is not a strategy” would be the first to “reject a larger appropriation...Tell me the alderman who is standing up saying, ‘I want the city [to] pay $400 million or $500 million, and I would approve that budget.’ You can’t have it both ways. There is no appetite,” Lee said, “in the city of Chicago — nor should there be — to bear 100% of the cost for something that is a global, national, state crisis as well.”
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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