-- Connecting the dots between our economy, government and business --
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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America once known as the manufacturing hub of the world is DOA thanks to Washington.
John Deere
As per the company’s latest decision, around 280 jobs will be terminated from a plant in East Moline, Illinois. In addition, another 230 employees working at a factory in Davenport, Iowa are also being let go. This is in addition to another 100 production workers at John Deere’s plant in Dubuque, Iowa, who are also being impacted by the layoffs.
Don’t worry, Mayor Brandon Johnson will make things better…not!
Will the last major corporation in Chicago please turn the lights off.
Private equity bought the company in 2021 and it shouldn’t come as a shock that out of state owners made a business decision to leave Illinois entirely.
SCH is now Morton’s parent company and they also own Kissel Salt, headquartered in Overland Park, KS. Though Kissel is smaller than Morton, (and their salt sucks) office leases there are half of downtown Chicago. No one seems to care that Morton has been here since 1848.
The business community owes Chicago nothing and there’s no sense of civic loyalty anymore. I remember reading, years back, maybe even in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, that near the end of the Roman Empire, there were all sorts of records of the elites and community leaders living in the countryside, failing to do their civic obligations in the cities, refusing to leave their villas. One such letter from the 4th century from one elite to another lamented that they couldn’t conduct provincial business because too few leaders actually showed up to conduct business, whereas for centuries earlier, being involved in… Read more »
Well the good thing is when it rains it pours