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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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Transit is dead. Long live transit. After losing riders for years slowly, America’s transit agencies were essentially destroyed by the Democrats’ authoritarian overreaction to the China Virus. Zoom meetings have replaced in-office work. Despite some companies making overtures to getting their people back in the office, ridership is a fraction of what it had been in the last ‘good’ year of 2019. Any other business faced with the market turning its back on their product would retreat and retrench. Would Union Pacific run empty trains as a matter of course? Nope. The railroads that have to earn their pay cut… Read more »
The day of reckoning will come with a financial collapse.
Get in line behind the public pensioners. What? You say poor folks need public transportation? Gosh, that’s a real shame.
If ridership is down and not coming back then it sounds like service cuts are in order.
CTA Has Lost Half Its Riders For Good — Now CTA — Like Other Failed, Obsolete US Transit Agencies — Wants A Giant Taxpayer Bailout