Category: Finance
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Clout Boosts Ex-Police Chief $30k per Year
The Machine taking care of its own: At first blush, a pension bill adopted by the General Assembly in 2007 seemed to have a laudable goal: extending retirement benefits to local police force employees’ widows after they remarried. But buried within the legislation was something considerably less altruistic: a provision that enabled a member of…
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Our Per Capita Government Debt Worse Than Greece
This chart was put together by Senator Jeff Session’s office. I found it over at The Weekly Standard.
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No Tax Refund if You Owe Parking Tickets
Really? Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Wednesday referred to people and businesses with unpaid city debts as “the deadbeats and the delinquents” after winning City Council approval to intercept their state income tax refunds to collect millions of dollars. … At every level we have protected the taxpayers of the city of Chicago by not raising…
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Your Water Bill Doubles For What?
God bless Ben Joravsky. All summer long, in press conferences and at public hearings, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s budget refrain remained the same: no more accounting gimmicks and no new taxes. “We have been doing smoke and mirrors on the budget and avoided taking control of our own future as a city,” he said at a…
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Illinois, the Greece of America
It all started with this story: Even though the legislature and Gov. Pat Quinn last year imposed a temporary 67 percent state income tax increase, Quinn’s office expects to have a $500 million budget deficit this year. Quinn is calling for a 9 percent cut in most areas of state government, except education and health care. But…
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Illinois Unemployment vs. The Media
Good News!! CHAMPAIGN, Ill. (AP) — Unemployment dropped to 9.8 percent in Illinois in December, state officials said Friday, a second straight monthly decrease that capped a year in which the jobless rate fell almost a full percentage point from 2010. via Chicago Tribune. Or, maybe not: The unemployment rate in the Chicago area rose…
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Wall Street Partying in Davos, We Suffer
I realize this is not a local issue but I can’t help myself: JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s profits last year were the highest in the bank’s history, and Citigroup Inc. returned money to the U.S. Treasury and reported its first full- year profit since 2007. Governments have so far opted against breaking up or levying…
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SEC Launches Inquiry Into IL Pension Fund
The Securities and Exchange Commission has launched an inquiry into public statements by Illinois officials about the state’s underfunded pension fund, the state’s governor’s office confirmed Monday night. (Full story here.) Well it’s official! The Springfield cabal has so poisoned the well that now the SEC is asking questions. We can only hope that they…
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Position on TIFs
Well it took some doing, but I have completed my policy on TIFs. This is critically important to the sustainability of the city moving forward. We cannot survive continuing to go further and further into debt year after year while our schools are failing and the TIF funds are growing bigger and bigger. We need…
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Bankruptcy an Option
From yesterday’s NYT: Policy makers are working behind the scenes to come up with a way to let states declare bankruptcy and get out from under crushing debts, including the pensions they have promised to retired public workers. … Unlike cities, the states are barred from seeking protection in federal bankruptcy court. … But proponents…