-- Connecting the dots between our economy, government and business --
Three projects under Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s Rebuild Illinois program, including a proposed port in beleaguered downstate Cairo, have benefited his friends or political allies. Pritzker insists the projects were funded on their merits.
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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Cairo like so many other southern Illinois towns are dying for an assortment of reasons including the closing of the coal mines that provided good wages to the residents of those small towns. Outlawing coal has not generated those promised green energy jobs, raised power bills and created a welfare climate in southern Illinois.
Thanks Democrats and be proud of the lives you have destroyed.
This is just further evidence that you can’t build any public project anywhere in Illinois without a healthy dose of old fashioned good old boy and good old girl style politics.
Business as usual.