Audio: Wirepoints’ Mark Glennon says Chicago pension buyout plan mostly shifts debt rather than eliminating it, property tax surge doubles inflation over three decades – Chicago’s Morning Answer
April 3, 2026
9 Comments
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.
Illinois lost another 54,000 tax filers and dependents, net, according to the IRS. Since 2000, fleeing taxpayers have taken $94 billion of annual adjusted gross income with them.
Yes, illegals are fully encouraged to apply.
Advancing its vision for healthcare equity, the State of Illinois in 2022 committed to providing medical coverage to adults ages 42-64 regardless of their immigration status.
https://hfs.illinois.gov/medicalclients/healthbenefitsforimmigrants/healthbenefitsforimmigrantadults.html#:~:text=Advancing%20its%20vision%20for%20healthcare,regardless%20of%20their%20immigration%20status.
Medicaid is now a general welfare program.
The bureaucrats who greenlighted this should be in irons.
The article has a whole salad bowl of new services including things like first month rent assistance, utility hookups, art therapy, grief and consoling so on and so forth. The real kicker is the line “State officials said they do not have an estimate of how much the new services will cost.” Once again we have a new dream program for the free stuff army with no idea what it will cost. Sometime in the future people will ask how the tax burdens of how this program got started and we get to look at it in its inception. Who… Read more »
I’d be shocked if illegals aren’t eligible.