-- Connecting the dots between our economy, government and business --
Oh, the goodness that comes from getting caught.
With a $6 billion bond sale looming, S&P Global Ratings assigned a triple-B-minus rating to Illinois on Monday. That’s the lowest rating before junk status. Illinois has by far the lowest credit rating of any U.S. state.
Decatur lost 3,400 residents from 2010 to 2016, or about 4.5 percent of its population.
With an exception or two, the Democratic candidates for governor had a grand time yesterday bashing Amazon the evil and deploring the possibility that the city and state might offer the company big to enormous incentives.
I understand the sentiment—and, to a degree, share it. Under banners that declared “our revolution,” the wannabe guvs were talking to a progressive audience at an event hosted by the Chicago Teachers Union. In that crowd, terms like “corporate welfare” are so much mother’s milk.
A comprehensive, apples-to-apples report on all 671 pensions in Illinois.
Lots of good data here, including this: Illinois has the third highest Census-reported number of school systems in the nation with a total of 905. Only California and Texas have a slightly higher number of school systems than Illinois, but the population of those states is more than double that of Illinois. Midwest states with similar populations, such as Michigan and Ohio, both have more than 200 fewer school systems than Illinois.
Comment: It appears no questions of any real substance were asked about our fiscal crisis, which is no surprise since the moderator was Mary Ann Ahern.
Chicago Public Schools officials can breathe easier now that Illinois lawmakers have lavished hundreds of millions more dollars on the district.
But the district’s enrollment loss is relentless: CPS officials project another drop of at least 8,000 this year, to around 370,000 students. That comes after a plunge of 11,000 last year. Enrollment has been sliding for years as age cohorts shrink and neighborhoods empty out.
As Illinois moves toward becoming a national model in retirement savings for small-business workers, the designers of the state’s new Secure Choice IRA plan were warned this week that if they don’t get the plan right, it could be doomed from the start.
At an Aspen Institute forum in Chicago, the state board planning the new program was warned repeatedly that the project could flop if small businesses are overwhelmed with bureaucratic paperwork and if low-income workers feel nervous about saving too much for retirement when paychecks already are stretched thin.
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