Because District 65, which includes students from Evanston and Skokie, won’t force teachers to work on-site, school buildings may not be able to accommodate all students who would like to come back to their classrooms. In that event, Superintendent Devon Horton reportedly said, the district would give priority to “Black and Brown students,” and others it considered to be “marginalized” or “oppressed.”

Comment: Refreshing candor from both Rep. Terra Costa Howard and Rich Miller about Madigan and labor unions.

Pritzker is facing a warrant for his arrest unless he shows up in court next week to explain why he should not be found in contempt.

Democrats violate the spirit of a law they authored. Republicans take advantage of loopholes in legislation they opposed. Both sides reap millions from big-money contributors and dole out cash to favored legislative candidates.

More than 250 Chicago-area suburbs and towns — and even neighborhoods within the city — have rates of coronavirus cases so high that they would trigger the city’s travel restrictions

Comment: And that collapse includes federal money Illinois heavily banked on in its current budget. See our own article on that here.

Richard Ingram, executive director of the $51.2 billion Illinois Teachers’ Retirement System, Springfield, resigned Thursday, effective immediately. On July 31, the board of trustees unanimously voted to place Mr. Ingram on administrative leave “due to performance issues covered by his employment contract,” a news release from the system said.

The money—$5,000 for renters and up to $15,000 for homeowners—is a way to stabilize people in their homes and forestall massive waves of eviction and foreclosure caused by the pandemic, an official administering the program said.

At publishing time, the protesters had ordered food delivery and more protesting supplies that arrived to them thanks to the hard work of actual essential workers.

Knight and Gallup conducted a random sample of 20,046 American adults between Nov. 8, 2019 and Feb. 16, 2020, and claimed a margin of error of plus or minus 1%.

The right is as bad as the left, claims Zorn.

A republication of our Wirepoints article.

French president Emmanuel Macron famously joked that his predecessor François Hollande’s tax increases would make France Cuba without the sun. Pritzker’s Illinois will be like California without the sun, Hollywood, or Silicon Valley—just the taxes.

Comment: This entrepreneur says that young, new entrepreneurs underpaying themselves will, under the the Fair Tax amendment, get a a tax cut. Just one problem with that: It’s not true. Only token cuts for lower income groups are proposed. And he says he’d be happy to pay higher rates now that he has a better income, and some others no doubt share his view. But if he knows the same VCs and angel investors we do he no doubt has spoken to some only by video call to Florida or other places to which many have fled.

In its “economic average” report, Yelp found about 5,100 Illinois-based business listings on its site have either temporarily closed or will permanently shutter.

Most of the closures, 4,400, were listed as Chicago-based businesses.

The case centers around three Illinois residents who sued the social media company under a state law called the Biometric Information Privacy Act, permitting residents to sue if their faces have been scanned for data without written consent.

Andrew Biggs and Sheilah Weinberg: “We propose, at least for discussion purposes, that if a state requests and receives federal aid for pension funding, then the state must agree to bring that public pension under federal regulation that was qualitatively similar to what private pensions work under.”

“Fixing Illinois’ finances is going to require more than lazy analysis and half-truth slogans. I encourage the [League of Women Coters] and other Fair Tax advocates to be more forthright in their communications. Voters deserve to know the facts about the Fair Tax, good and bad, so they can make an informed decision.”

“Fixing Illinois’ finances is going to require more than lazy analysis and half-truth slogans. I encourage the League of Women Voters and other Fair Tax advocates to be more forthright in their communications. Voters deserve to know the facts about the Fair Tax, good and bad, so they can make an informed decision.”

Comment: It’s about time. See our article here from earlier this week on how BLM, which is violent, Marxist and antisemetic, is duping supporters.

Health care and pension payments rose much faster than teacher salaries did and, as a result, benefits are eating up a growing share of teacher compensation. Teacher health care costs rose by 27.6 percent over the course of the decade, well above the rates for wages or inflation, but the real culprit was teacher pensions. Over the last decade, teacher retirement costs soared by 126.4 percent.

A national republication of our Wirepoints article.

One reason why British institutions have been captured by the forces of illiberalism is contagion from the US, where the movement has been most extreme.

Even the citadels of capitalism have fallen. Giant corporations instruct their employees in diversity training but fail to provide them with medical insurance, childcare facilities or decent incomes.

Research shows government’s spending choices matter. More specifically, fixing the state’s finances primarily with cuts to government wages and benefits has a better chance of encouraging successful expansion. But fiscal adjustments that rely on tax increases to raise government wages and benefits while cutting public investment harm the economy in the long run.

Comment: We, too, wrote earlier about problems in the Vendor Assistance Program.

Illinois is one of 17 states suing the Trump administration.

The emails continue to pour in. Thousands of workers furloughed or laid off due to COVID-19 shutdowns still have not received unemployment ­­­­­help from the state of Illinois, to which they are entitled.

A republication of our Wirepoints article.

That’s how long it takes to reserve a one-way U-Haul outbound

“Everyone is leaving. No one is coming,” a U-Haul agent told us a few weeks ago.

Perspective of an actuary.

It’s a statewide movement designed to get you to put down electronic devices and get involved in some outdoor activities.

The Illinois Municipal League (IML) and state business leaders today called on the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity (DCEO) to amend a proposal that would prevent local governments from directly receiving millions of dollars in federal funds to support economic development and help businesses stay afloat during the Coronavirus pandemic.

“Burdensome, unnecessary” state rules dictating how federal CARES Act — Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security — funds are allocated to local authorities will “likely” make fewer dollars available to officials to use as they deem appropriate, Brad Cole, executive director of the Illinois Municipal League, said at an outdoor event in Springfield.

Illinois is ground zero for mismanaged pensions and offers instructive lessons on what not to do. It spends the most in the nation on pensions as a percentage of state and local revenue collections, about double the national average. It increased inflation-adjusted pension spending by more than 500% since 2000. But despite this first-in-the-nation spending, Illinois also has the worst pension-debt-to-revenue ratio among U.S. states, according to Moody’s.

Comment: Refreshing candor from Chicago Teachers’ investment chief Angela Miller-May. “If you talk to anyone who says that they know exactly where the market is going and that they have all of the answers, they really don’t know,” she said.

A new audit of the Illinois Department of Employment Security reveals systemic failures long before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. The audit covered a two-year period ending in June 2019 and found 15 cases of IDES failing to comply with state laws and regulations, including having a lack of internal controls to protect people’s personal information from cyber attacks.

Comment: See our own article on this linked here. The state’s defense includes the “police power” argument, which Pritzker ridicules when it comes to pension reform.

While providing some direct aid to states, the Coronavirus Aid, Relief & Economic Security Act is going to cause state income tax revenue to decline even further. Illinois is unwittingly about to allow as much as $1 billion to flow from state coffers to high-income taxpayers.

See our own article on the eviction moratorium linked here.

“All dressed up as historic figures.I just covered myself in Stars&Stripes. Next year I’m going as Mt.Rushmore!” That was Illinois’ Tammy Duckworth when she

Madigan wants to immediately cover up the portrait of Lincoln’s former rival and eventually replace it with one of Barack Obama.

She was contacted by Brian Troyer, dean of undergraduate admissions at Marquette, who she said told her her acceptance to the school was far from certain.

“[He] had the heart to tell me I wasn’t a student,” Pfefferle said. “This means that my classification is still in limbo and is currently being decided by the administration. I have been accepted, I paid for my housing, I have my roommates, I even have a complete class schedule. If

The school further explains that “this workshop is not a debate: This is not a platform for debating the existence of white privilege or white supremacy,” says the description. “It is assumed that participants already acknowledge these concepts, though they will be reviewed and defined in accessible terms.”

A republication of our Wirepoints article.

“I recall my first day at the US Air Force Academy…. We were taught how to stand at attention. We weren’t taught to take a knee.”

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

Gov. J.B. Pritzker has contributed another $51.5 million to a ballot initiative committee backing an amendment to the Illinois Constitution allowing for a graduated-rate income tax, a show of force in what is expected to be an expensive and contentious battle over the billionaire governor’s signature policy goal.

Comment: This dispute will be ended quickly, one way or another, upon an appeal.

There’s a strong hint of tit-for-tat in a move that has little to do with health and a lot to do with regional and political posturing in a not-so-united country. The interstate chest-puffing might have some entertainment value, but Americans shouldn’t feel any obligation to obey the pointless rules.

“One, there’s a financial problem; two, there’s a jobs problem; three, there’s a trust problem and four, there’s a fairness problem,” Rauschenberger says in a video interview released by the Technology & Manufacturing Association this week.

Comment: You will recall that Bailey won his initial case in state court but refiled it to add additional claims. The state then attempted to remove the case to Federal Court, which that Federal court has now rejected. The state trial court now presumably will reinstate its decision against the order, which will be appealed in state courts.

“Wirepoints policy analysts Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner opined in mid-June that ‘case positivity rates downstate have collapsed for nearly two straight months and never reached the highs seen in Chicagoland.'”

Comment: We will be watching this and similar lawsuits closely and writing about them soon. The state’s position on this seems indefensible.

Comment: See our own article on this topic here as it pertains to Illinois.

Full text of Trump’s letter is here.

Comment: That’s good news, of course, because those additional cases weren’t known because the victims never got sick. Antibody testing is the basis for this new finding, which the Pritzker Administration has stonewalled.

Illinois ranked 22nd in the country in the quickest job recovery since last week, and ninth since the pandemic began.

No need to make politically unpopular decisions, because that state gasoline tax automatically goes up on July 1. Same for lawmakers giving themselves $1,800 raises while being able to claim: “We didn’t vote for those. They were automatic.”

David Skeel, law prof: “The best way for Congress to help states, both with their immediate coronavirus problems and with longer-term structural issues, would be to include a state-bankruptcy framework within any pandemic-response aid package it enacts.”

Iowa side booms while Illinois side languishes. The scene is playing out in other border communities around the country where workers and shoppers regularly cross state lines. The relatively stringent lockdown regime in Illinois compared with Iowa has created a clear shift in current spending patterns and potential longer-term consequences.

We estimate that the economic declines implied by recent forecasts from the Congressional Budget Office will lead to a shortfall of roughly $106 billion in states’ sales and income tax revenues for the 2021 fiscal year. Additional tax shortfalls from the second quarter of 2020 may amount to roughly $42 billion.

“We would respectfully ask that Amazon partner with all of us to help better engage our communities in a positive fashion that promotes trust and relationship building than one that clearly looks to tear at the fabrics on which we all believe.”

Ralph Martire is executive director of the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability and the Arthur Rubloff Professor of Public Policy at Roosevelt University.

Leslie Munger, former Illinois Comptroller in “Cooking Up An Illinois Budget Disaster,” tries to get through to the blockheads who seem comfortable with the direction that the state is heading: a financial boneyard. Or the partisan politicians and journalists who try to ignore the hell that awaits.

Comment: Inexcusable. Antibody test results are key to many aspects of the fight against the virus.

A reprint of our Wirepoints article.

By Ameya Pawar and Ted Cox.

Illinois was the first recipient of a Fed loan.

Comment: This really isn’t just for math wonks. It’s also for non-wonks who want a look behind the curtain on COVID projections. The math behind the curtain is mostly nothing more than high school algebra, but with lots of scary looking Greek abbreviations that are often just informed guesses.

A reprint of our Wirepoints article.

As Illinois lawmakers in May considered a budget for the fiscal year that starts July 1, they already faced an estimated $7 billion combined revenue shortfall for fiscal 2020 and 2021, in large part attributable to the COVID-19 pandemic. To help close that gap, the General Assembly adopted a spending plan premised on borrowing up to $4.5 billion from the Federal Reserve’s new Municipal Liquidity Facility (MLF)—with the hope that the state will be able to repay those funds with federal budget aid not yet approved by Congress. On June 2, the state announced an initial $1.2 billion of borrowing

Traditional lender-of-last-resort theory cautions that central banks should restrict their lending to illiquid but solvent institutions. The City of Chicago and State of Illinois may not strictly be in bankruptcy or related resolution arenas yet, but they have been headed in that direction, and more than a few parties believe those proceedings can and/or should arrive down the road.

Comment: Listen to Lightfoot’s profane, condescending answer to exactly the right question from Ald. Ray Lopez. And she says a cop should be fired for flipping off a protester.

Last week Illinois Democrats approved a $43 billion budget—6% larger than last year’s—that includes a $261 million pay raise for state workers. The budget authorized $5 billion in borrowing to fill a deficit until Speaker Pelosi’s Operation Bailout arrives. This week the Prairie State become the first to tap the Federal Reserve’s new state and local government facility after it tried and failed to borrow $1.2 billion in the bond market. Illinois and its cities have already received $8.3 billion from Congress’s previous three relief bills.

In Chicago, of the 1,500, police only referred 235 to the prosecutors office for serious felony consideration, most of them gun cases.

By Chicago native Jonathan Turley.

“Will Rep. Underwood stay silent about her top donor [Omar]’s support of defunding the police? Will Underwood push to defund Chicago Police as well?” the group tweeted, referring to Rep. Lauren Underwood (D-Ill.), whom Omar has supported.

Wirepoints founder Mark Glennon has been tracking the COVID crisis not just from the health numbers side, but the economic side. He said it’s obvious the governor didn’t take into account the negative economic impacts of his decisions. “And the healthcare costs, lost lives in the long wrong of a ruined economy now pretty clearly exceed the risk associated with having the strictest lockdown rule in the country in place.”

Because when liberals admonish people to “believe the science,” what they are usually saying is “shut up and do as you’re told.”

State Rep. La Shawn Ford, D-Chicago, called for Pritzker to sign an executive order that Ford says will free up spending to help rebuild African-American communities around the state in the wake of both the COVID-19 pandemic and the looting.

“We know the black community has been hit the hardest by COVID-19, the black community has been hit the hardest by violence, the black community has been hit the hardest by police brutality and the black community has been hit the hardest by the recent looting and riots,” Ford said.

Thank you to ZeroHedge for republishing our article.

Elim Romanian Pentecostal Church in Chicago’s Albany Park neighborhood, and Logos Baptist Ministries in Niles, want a high court ruling before this weekend.

“Is it just a coincidence the contractor involved in Pritzker’s private construction projects got coronavirus contracts?”

The state’s 2021 budget, now headed to Gov. J. B. Pritzker’s (D.) desk, is written with the expectation that the $3.5 billion the state received under the CARES Act will be freed up for general spending. That would require Congress to change limitations on those funds, which currently can only be spent on expenses directly related to coronavirus—not general fiscal costs.

An actuary’s perspective.

Comment: The White House/CDC guidelines this article references are widely ignored because they are illogical on their face for reasons we wrote here.

Nearly two-thirds of leisure and hospitality jobs in New York and New Jersey and about half in California and Illinois disappeared between February and April compared to 43% in Florida, which was among the last states to lock down and first to reopen. Four percent of construction workers in Florida lost their jobs compared to 41% in New York, 27% in New Jersey, 17% in California and 11% in Illinois.

“But the way I see it, we’ve given up our liberties quickly, in a matter of weeks, on the word of experts and politicians afraid of being wrong. The experts have seen the data change by the day, and so have their expert recommendations on what to do. It’s all been so stunning. The rise of the technocratic elite. The eager capitulation of the people. The shutdown. The jobs and businesses lost. Our liberty lost.”

“There are no words that would do justice to describe what Judge McHaney said during his ruling.”

The figures released by the state show lower totals, however, because officials have stopped including in their public data 74 facilities that have not had a new case in the past 28 days, an IDPH spokeswoman said Friday.

“However well-intentioned they may be, the executive orders appear to reach far beyond the scope of the 30-day emergency authority granted to the governor under Illinois law,” Steven D. Weinhoeft, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Illinois, said in a statement. “Even during times of crisis, executive actions undertaken in the name of public safety must be lawful.”

The omissions are part of the revised way the state will report COVID-19 cases and deaths at nursing homes; the change was made “to focus on those facilities currently experiencing an outbreak,” an agency spokeswoman said.

The monthly unemployment rate rose to a new record high since current methodologies were enacted in 1976 and the monthly decline in nonfarm payroll jobs also set a record. .Compared to a year ago, nonfarm payroll employment decreased by -822,800 jobs, with losses across all major industries. The number of unemployed workers increased dramatically from the prior month, a +280.3 percent increase to 1,004,400, a new record high, and was up +270.6 percent over the same month for the prior year.

The Illinois Emergency Management Agency, or IEMA, sent a memo to local law enforcement officials on May 20 informing them federal funds may be withheld from their department if they do not enforce Pritzker’s executive order. It stated, “failure to execute or enforce the [executive order] could be considered noncompliance with the [Public Assistance Program Grant] Agreement condition to comply with all applicable state laws, regulations and policies thus placing the applicant’s funding in jeopardy.”

An actuary’s perspective.

“The millions of casualties of a continued shutdown will be hiding in plain sight, but they will be called alcoholism, homelessness, suicide, heart attack, stroke, or kidney failure. In youths it will be called financial instability, unemployment, despair, drug addiction, unplanned pregnancies, poverty, and abuse.”

Comment: Yet another analysis showing Illinois is an outlier, being one of only three states “mostly closed.”

As the state moves forward with reopening, Illinois State Police say they won’t arrest someone for violating the executive orders or emergency rules.

No one is speaking for the small brick and mortar businesses; no one is speaking for the kids and families facing mental illnesses. No one is standing for women who have lost their jobs. It’s up to us, mothers, and women to tell the governor of Illinois our stories, the stories of the small businesses we lean on to be a community, so they can be part of

Comment: “Testing, testing, testing. That’s what every epidemiologist, every immunologist, every responsible business owner and everyone who cares about safely opening up our economy says we must do to successfully maintain a high standard of protection as we move into phase three and phase four,” Pritzker said earlier.

It seems to be therapeutic to many of my friends to have their beliefs reinforced each night that anyone who complains about shutdowns is unintelligent or malevolent.

Truth in Accounting’s warnings about the state’s dire financial situation have been largely ignored for years. I assume that we were one of the “carnival barkers, the doomsayers, the paid professional critics” Pritzker mentioned during his last state of the state address.

“We’re letting murderers and rapists out, but now we’re going to put business owners in jail and charge them with a Class A misdemeanor if they decide that they need to provide for their family,” Cabello said.

Newly reopened salons and restaurants in the Iowa Quad-Cities welcomed customers from Illinois who joined in the reopening weekend Saturday for haircuts, hamburgers and more Saturday.

As neighboring states begin to reopen, Illinois counties become restless.

See our own story on this linked here.

Ralph Martire heads the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability.

Past and present political leadership at all levels of Illinois government should be ashamed of themselves for the current conditions in the state. Unfortunately, they are incapable of addressing the issues facing the good people of Illinois.

A suburban state’s attorney has joined his name to the growing list of those questioning Gov. JB Pritzker’s use of emergency powers amid the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly criticizing the Illinois Attorney General for embracing a legal position that could leave Illinois under the rule of one man for years and treats Illinois citizens and businesses as “state resources.”

By Elizabeth Bauer a/k/a Jane the Actuary: “What it comes down to is this: So many of us have been doing our part. (Ask me how many face masks I’ve sewn and given away.) But we need reasonable, sensible plans from the governor.”

Comment: Notable because, if this is indicative of the mainstream press, confidence in Pritzker’s handling of the shutdown is clearly gone.

Thank you to ZeroHedge for republishing our article.

For those interested in the courts’ opinions.

“We write to you with deep concern over the recent threats issued by Governor J.B. Pritzker to possibly withhold federal aid provided through the State of Illinois from any local government that reopens its economy in accordance with federal health guidelines but ahead of Governor Pritzker’s own arbitrary timetable.”

“It is outrageous that the Governor is threatening retaliation against these leaders and the men and women of their offices”

Comment: Note that this is the test for the actual infection, not Abbott’s antibody test, which FDA confirmed is 99% accurate.

The Cook County Circuit Judge also denied a request for a declaratory judgment that Pritzker’s emergency powers under the Illinois Emergency Management Act expired April 8, or 30 days after he issued his March 9 disaster proclamation. Gamrath rejected that argument, holding the IEMA Act gives Pritzker authority to extend his power beyond an initial 30-day period without approval from the legislature. The 30-day limit, Gamrath wrote, only applies more strictly to a “discrete event — one that stops and starts in a relatively short amount of time.”

Comment: Be sure to read the newly found written legal opinion from the Senior Assistant Attorney General Michael Luke, Chief, Opinions Bureau. So, why is the AG now arguing in court against that opinions which, as you will see, is clearly sensible?

Thank you to ZeroHedge for publishing our article.

“Our best guess is something like 60% of the employment reduction is going to be temporary, and 40% is going to be permanent.”

“The COVID recession does not look like a normal recession. t’s part natural disaster and it’s part war. So the other good analogy is Pearl Harbor….”

Comment: Note in particular the last column in their about the ratio of pay-go rate to current contributions. That means how much more would have to be paid to honor pensions if the pension runs out of money, which is when the government becomes directly liable for pensions. Chicago’s teacher pension, for example, would have to pay out about 1.5 times more than is currently being put into the pension each year.

“These people do not follow science or data. They’re just listening to partisan rhetoric perhaps, and following their own instincts, but no science,” Pritzker said.

Federal Reserve officials warned the virus outbreak and a partial shutdown of the U.S. economy would result in a decline in the current quarter of historic proportions and risk the potential of massive bankruptcies that could create a lasting scar.

“You will get business failures on a grand scale and you will be taking risks that you would go into depression” if shutdowns persist, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis President James Bullard said.

Comment: We will publish our response to the anti-state bankruptcy voices as soon as they have finished having their say. Our view is that the concept should continue to be explored but that judgement should be based based on the specifics of any particular proposal, because there are so many possible forms it could takeand the details make all the difference in the world.

A republication of our Wirepoints article.

“We expected a big turnout, but nothing prepared me for this,” Central Illinois Foodbank Executive Director Pam Molitoris said. More than 1,000 cars wrapped around the fairgrounds from Happy Hollow all the way around by the Illinois Department of Natural Resources.

Volunteers said they were shocked by the turnout.

Comment: This would seem to answer why so many deaths and sicknesses are being attributed to COVID-19.

Comment: No mention by Crain’s in this endorsement of Pritzker’s order of any concerns about his claimed right to extend his emergency orders forever, or about the gating requirements for reopening that likewise may never be met. And the self-contradictions are brazen. “The all-or-nothing-ism surrounding government response to the virus is a false choice,” they say, yet they make their case against this straw man — “the expectation in some quarters that all we must do to get the economy moving again is to throw the doors open.”

“I am baffled by what appears to be an abandonment of the original strategy to fight Covid19,” Streit said Wednesday on Facebook.

Streit said the new five-phase regional plan that was “instituted without legislative approval” seems to abandon the previous strategy of staying home to flatten the curve.

The tradeoff isn’t between lives and livelihoods. The policy goal has to be to protect both as much as possible. Deploy more personal protective equipment, greatly increase testing, build surge capability to handle flare-ups, and isolate society’s most vulnerable to keep hospitals from getting overwhelmed. But for heaven’s sake reopen the economy so we don’t consign millions to years of poverty.

“We implore the governor to reconsider.”

For 43 Wisconsin Republican lawmakers, the urge to bash Illinois and go on record against bailouts for state governments during the coronavirus pandemic was just too good to pass up.

Comment: But in Illinois, all state workers are paid in full with full pension accruals, regardless of whether they are working, and many have a pay raise coming July 1.

No regrets over his widely ridiculed letter requesting federal money for Illinois.

The impact of the coronavirus-induced economic shutdown tore through the U.S. labor market in April at historic levels, slashing 20.5 million workers from nonfarm payrolls and sending the unemployment rate skyrocketing to 14.7%, the Labor Department reported Friday.

“Look out, America: Illinois, New Jersey and New York are coming for your wallet.”

Thank you to ZeroHedge for republishing our article.

Illinois, which had fiscal problems before the coronavirus, tops the list with an $11 billion request in May and June.

Comment: Andrew Biggs from American Enterprise Institute had the right reaction on Twitter to this document. “I would risk Covid to have a public debate over this nutty study claiming that public sector pensions generate net revenues for their states,” he said.

Comment: This article doesn’t mention the incident last week in Illinois, described here, but it sure applies. A good lesson for all sides.

Comment: Astonishing. Simply astonishing.

Illinois is the fourth most restrictive state.

Comment: Plenty of Illinoisans outside of Chicagoland would welcome that.

“My question for you is, where in the constitution did the people of Wisconsin confer authority on a single, unelected Cabinet secretary to compel almost 6 million people to stay at home and close their businesses and face imprisonment if they don’t comply, with no input from the Legislature, without the consent of the people?” Justice Rebecca Bradley asked.

Comment: The deadline for putting a Fair Maps amendment on the November ballot expired on May 3. So much for Governor Pritzker’s promise to end gerrymandering.

The relief would include a six-month cancellation of apartment rent, along with an across-the-board ban on rent increases. Homeowners would be able to defer their mortgage payments for the same period without fees and be offered an extended period later to catch up. Added state Sen. Robert Peters, D-Chicago, “We must act to not only flatten the curve healthwise but flatten the economic inequality that exists.”

Comment: If this is accurate, it certainly is true that many will find it better to stay on unemployment than going back to work before August 1.

Comment: This echoes precisely what Wirepoints has been arguing repeatedly. Pritzker is wrong to say this is about lives versus livelihoods.

Includes transcript of his Sunday appearance on Face the Nation.

“And in Illinois, which has not yet seen the predicted surges of COVID-19 hospital care, overall patient volume is 59% below norms – driven by a 76% reduction in outpatient surgeries.”

Comment: Better yet would be daily number of new hospitalizations, but they don’t even collect that.

Comment: Outstanding look at the big picture.

The letter points specifically to Illinois, which has received nearly $5 billion in federal funds this year through legislation passed by Congress to shore up coronavirus-related budgetary shortfalls.

Comment: While it’s certainly true that we don’t know today how a state bankruptcy would turn out, this article leaves much to be desired. It sometimes conflates municipal bankruptcy with state bankruptcy, but state bankruptcy could take many different forms, perhaps very different from municipal bankruptcy. It presumes what payment priorities would be, when in fact we don’t know what priorities Congress would establish. It says spending on social services and public safety would be imperiled, when in fact preserving that spending is the entire point and undoubtedly would be prioritized. It says secured bondholders would lose out to unsecured