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.
“The labor force participation rate was 61.6 percent, which has been nearly constant since June 2020 and is about 1.7 percentage points lower than in February 2020.” …The low rate of labor participation in Cook County fails to account for 100’s of thousands of hard-working gang bangers and criminals. Out of the 61.6%, how many of these jobs are private enterprise and how many are taxpayer-funded jobs? The point is that an oversized segment of the population is permanently non-productive.