Thoughts & Musings
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...
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...
Unions Investment in Chicago (Elections)
Four years ago, SEIU spent almost $2.5 million in Council races, spearheading a union effort that helped depose Daley allies like Madeline Haithcock, Shirley Coleman and Dorothy Tillman. Asked about the budget for this election, Balanoff said SEIU expects to be...
Big Tax Hikes Result in Less Revenue
Last year, voters in Oregon voted to raise taxes on the highest income earners in the state, giving Oregon the highest tax rates of any state in the nation. It hasn't worked out too well for Oregonians, according to the Wall Street Journal: In 2009 the state...
Wisconsin ‘Open for Business’
Wisconsin is open for business. In these challenging economic times while Illinois is raising taxes, we are lowering them. On my first day in office I called a special session of the legislature, not in order to raise taxes, but to open Wisconsin for business. Already...
How to Really Save Education
The cool indy magazine Fast Company has a huge spread on education called, plainly enough, How to Spend $100 Million to Really Save Education. Naturally not all of the ideas are fully baked. It is Fast Company after all; it's meant to be an article on the fringe, and...
Robbery using Pepper Spray (instead of handgun)
Three men attempting to rob a Loop Old Navy store Tuesday by deploying pepper spray fled without stealing anything. Three men entered a retail store at 35 N. State St. about 7 p.m. and one of them deployed pepper spray or a similar chemical agent on three patrons in...
Daley: Giffords Tragedy Show Need for More Gun Laws
Mayor Richard Daley expressed sadness and outrage in the wake of the Arizona shooting rampage, and said the incident is yet more evidence that stronger gun control is needed. ... "But unfortunately, events like this happen far too often in America. We have to come...
Fermilab’s Tevatron Shutting Down
The Tevatron at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory will be shut down later this year after the Batavia-based lab failed to win additional funding from the Obama administration. Once the world’s largest atom smasher — technically, a proton-antiproton collider — the...
$5/gal gas? Yes Says Former Shell Exec
NOTE: This story is a few weeks old. 12/28/2010 Gasoline rationing and $5 pump prices are predicted by 2012 for consumers if U.S. politicians don't get their act together, a former Shell executive said. ... John Hofmeister, a former president at Shell Oil, told the...
O’Hare Bonds Downgraded
The cost of debt is going up because of years of bad management. A major credit rating firm delivered a stern warning Monday regarding the mounting risks that Chicago is taking by going deeper into debt in an attempt to build more runways at O’Hare International...
Convicted But Still on the Payroll
Chicago, the city that works, is also the city that keeps on paying city employees long after they’re convicted of corruption.Nine former city employees were paid a total of $383,205 after they pleaded guilty or were found guilty in corruption cases, records show....
Gas Tax at Work
CAMARILLO, Calif. (AP) — The twice-monthly Lundberg Survey has found the price of regular gasoline has risen about nine cents a gallon over three weeks to $3.08. ... Lundberg says the highest gas price in the country was recorded in Chicago at $3.35 a gallon. The...
Parking Meter Analysis
So Monday is the Chicago Tribune Editorial Board review for the Second Ward candidates and as I was having breakfast this morning I got to thinking. How bad really was the parking meter deal? So I started poking around to find out. Ten minutes later I was shocked!!...
State Dems Press Ahead on Tax Hikes
Gov. Pat Quinn and top Democrats are pressing forward on a major income-tax increase and a $1-a-pack hike in cigarette taxes. The personal income tax rate would rise from 3 percent to 5.25 percent, Senate President John Cullerton said this evening. The amount tracks...
Media Drops Ball on Taste Proposal
Chicago aldermen responded coolly Tuesday to a lone bidder’s proposal to charge Taste of Chicago patrons a $20 admission fee — and up to $65 for tickets to a music stage that draws the biggest-name talent to the lakefront festival. (Full story here.) This is the whole...
Truism
Someone sent me this quote today as part of a longer email: It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes. A principle which if acted on would save one-half the wars of the world. --- Thomas Jefferson I can't help but thinking that the debt we...
Gratuitous Spending at CPS
An independent investigation into spending by Chicago Public Schools' board presidents has uncovered more than $800,000 in questionable expenses in recent years, including thousands spent at lavish restaurants and hotels at a time when teachers and the district's...
Unions vs. Taxpayers – Part 2 of 2
Also from the New York Times: Faced with growing budget deficits and restive taxpayers, elected officials from Maine to Alabama, Ohio to Arizona, are pushing new legislation to limit the power of labor unions, particularly those representing government workers, in...
Unions vs. Taxpayers – Part 1 of 2
From the NYT a few days ago: Across the nation, a rising irritation with public employee unions is palpable, as a wounded economy has blown gaping holes in state, city and town budgets, and revealed that some public pension funds dangle perilously close to bankruptcy....