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"The Pritzkers have a history of legally skirting tax payments."
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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Why pay any taxes?? No performance, no money. Plain and simple, just like the private sector.
TIFs are incestuous partnerships between municipal officials and private business interests. There is little official language limiting the personal profit a municipal official might enjoy based upon his broad authority to sign over billions of public assets/funding with a penstroke. The AH TIF= 40 years of taxable real property asset inflation (think 1980’s prices vs. now) given directly to The Bears ownership. Think of the multimillions over the next 40 years of enormous new unfunded- mandated public service provision made necessary by this development: more police, emts, school employees, roads, liability insurance, stepped-up required medical care provision mandated by types… Read more »
Interesting observations about Angel Investor tax credits: limited to $10 million tax credits total per year first come first served. So Pritzkers must have gotten lucky or fast or both to scoop up significant percentages of a given year’s max allocation mentioned in article. the angel investor must own shares in the company, and can deduct all losses (if looses there be), and enjoy all the upside if the company succeeds. that is, IL gets no stake in the success of company. do these companies ever stay based in Illinois (paying taxes) in a success scenario after they turn profitable… Read more »
Look into mHUB and the Clean Tech Economic Coalition, et. al. It’s a sister organization of 1871 and just received 25 Million. I have no idea about Angel Investor tax credits, but it seems to me like an extension of the same tactics in the article and a perfect tax dodging vehicle. It’s a venture capital investor’s dream, with subsidized risk and ample opportunities for profiting off state and federal tax $$. mHUB executives are also responsible for disrupting energy markets, too. Sponsored by Nicor Gas & Southern Company: https://mhubaccelerator.com/news/mhub-announces-climate-energy-tech-accelerator/ Market disruption: https://www.mhubchicago.com/blog/2025-cleantech-economy-coalition-build-back-better-regional-challenge-phase-1-finalist Public $$ with venture benefits & no… Read more »
Just as with TIF, these crony capitalist deals could be reformed by law to perform the economic benefits originally touted. Clawback provisions, actual oversight+penalties for corrupt practices, less ambiguous wording of condition provisions like “blight” or “jobs creation”… Springfield has shown zero progress on TIF reform, despite spending millions on “reports” by friendly consultants. I think the only survival tactic for Illinois non-collaborators is to flee, wait, and try to back public employees/claimants in the eventual firesale of Illinois real estate. Pensioneer debtors can try to engage a bidding war against Pritzkeresque crowd who have access to limitless family bank… Read more »
No need to flee. Fight back!!! There are ways to prevent this kind of stuff. How about new federal laws similar to the Copeland anti-kickback act that prevents mega donations for contracts? Law firms making huge partisan donations for legal work in some sort of quid pro quo arrangement is just one thing that comes to mind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copeland_%22Anti-kickback%22_Act
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Kickback_Enforcement_Act
If nothing else, sunlight disinfects. Keep talking about it and people will take notice.
As you must know, Anti Kickback federal law is enforced at the whim of Private-Public Government Industry.
See for example exemption to anti-kickback laws granted to GBOs (lately re-branded as GPOs). These murderous exemptions have shunted trillions of public money, at the cost of American lives (lives lost to simple shortages of chemotherapy drugs or saline bags), to revolving door legislator/futuremil$consultants on Schumer committee overseeing the protection and secrecy of this incredible exemption.
And, ensuring the criminal prosecution of doctors who might introduce consumer protections attendant to increased competition in medical service provision.
Fight back?
https://www.physiciansagainstdrugshortages.com/
Well, we’ve got to start somewhere. Getting people’s attention and explaining to them why everything is broken is a good strategy for change.
None of this is new information . Lots of information, no action. One potentially doable action item is to offer reward payments for the recording of discrete incidents of government corruption. For example, a formatted onesheet on Jenny Thornley,another on the corrupt (by way of being proveably non-uniform) underassessment practices under Berrios Assessor regime, etcetera and so forth. Collect this information and save it immutably on blockchain. So the story of Jenny Thornley cannot disappear from internet like Whitewater or Carol Mosely Braun defrauding taxpayers to pay Medicaid for her asset-stripped mother. Crowdsourced insider information can be the basis of… Read more »
Spoiled rich kid who would be shoveling horse crap in a stable instead of owning the stable because of his ancestors. Toilet gate was enough to disqualify fat boy from ever holding office but the letter “D” after his name insured his victory no matter what a scumbag he is. Interesting also was how his family and therefore some of his fortune came from a cooperative agreement with President Trump in a real estate deal. I bet JB and his family were kissing Trump’s ass to get the deal done.
You need to get over the idea that “D” is guaranteed victory. It’s not. Federal funding and Pritzker’s wealth were the greatest contributions to his election.
Really. You must be living on a different planet. Run as a Republican in Cook/County/Chicago and see how well you do.
The best a Republican could ever do in Cook/Chicago is 39.1% of the vote, which is what Patrick W. O’Brien got in 2020 when he ran against the equally toxic Kim Foxx, who received 54.2% In that election, 6.7% of the population voted for the Libertarian candidate Brian Dennehy to avoid voting for a Republican. Asking a Democrat to vote for even one Republican is like asking a Muslim to eat bacon. They can’t do it because it goes against every belief they hold that forms their identity. But Kim Foxx is wildly, wildly popular in minority communities. She received… Read more »
“Asking a Democrat to vote for even one Republican is like asking a Muslim to eat bacon. They can’t do it because it goes against every belief they hold that forms their identity.” This is absolutely absurd. “But Kim Foxx is wildly, wildly popular in minority communities. She received upwards of 90% or more of the votes in minority precincts. These are margins that even Putin can’t reach and he cheats.” That was before she screwed up everything and people figured out what she is about. “Just a few weeks ago, surveys showed that crime was not a major issue for minority… Read more »
LOL, here’s the receipts… Men and women were equally concerned about crime, with 47% of men ranking it No. 1, and 42% of women. The racial breakdown of those prioritizing crime showed a more pronounced difference: 61% of white voters, 30% of Black voters and 37% of Hispanic voters. https://www.wbez.org/stories/poll-crime-tops-chicago-voters-issues-this-mayoral-election/d883f428-d268-4c39-9a9d-6aa13566c447 Also, Kim Foxx was elected in 2016, she had four years to screw things up, which she did royally. That’s why in 2020, O’Brien won 39.1% of the vote, and 6.7% of Cook County – 147,000 voters – held their nose to vote Libertarian because they can’t vote for any… Read more »
Many of the opinions on crime differed depending on the race of the voters surveyed. Overall, 65% of all respondents felt relations between local law enforcement officers and the community were generally negative. As high as that number is, it’s sharply higher among Black residents, with 85% — more than four out of five — calling police relations negative. Among Hispanic voters, 63% found relations with police negative, and among white voters, 49%. Black and white voters differed considerably in their opinions on reducing crime and fixing the criminal justice system. Broken down by race, 31% of Black voters listed… Read more »
Vallas just wants to make a runoff and then he’s praying for a miracle.
Last I checked, Pritzker was Governor. Chicago is a city in the State of Illinois. Illinois is an almost exclusively RED state, and we’ve had many governors that have butted heads with Chicago politicians. Taking back the governor’s seat is a necessary step to flipping Chicago. Lightfoot has screwed up badly enough that it could happen soon. If you guys want to stray into arguments and positions against your own best interests, I can’t help you.
Dave, JB’s vote producing machine produced between 500k and 700k more votes for the Democrat party than any other election since IIRC 1976 when gubernatorial elections were moved to the mid-terms from presidential years. Prior to JB’s ballot harvesting efforts, Republican votes and Democrat votes were roughly similar each mid-term election cycle, with one party having a slight edge over the election depending on the year or the national wave. But everything changed in 2018 when JB supposedly got 2.7 million votes, the most votes of ANY gubernatorial candidate in the modern era. He got IIRC 2.4 or 2.5 million… Read more »
Did it ever occur to you that you’re your own worst enemy? I can’t think of anything more counterproductive than fanatically posting losing stats for people, you supposedly side with, that are trying to make a difference.
Rome was invincible until it was overrun by savages. Nicolae Ceaușescu had 100% public approval until he was executed. Few leaders or experts predicted the fall of the Soviet Union.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-research-moody-s/moodys-analytics-election-model-predicts-clinton-win-idUSKBN12W56J
Pritzker is all about taxing the wealthy but somehow manages to escape taxation towards his financial activities and it would not surprise me one bit if his State taxes are mainly computed as a Florida homeowner. Has anybody checked this out before? It could perhaps be done if he disclosed a copy of his State tax returns but as always this seems to only apply to Republicans running for President.
Interesting that Forbes/ Mr Birnbaum did not research things like ‘tolietgate’. Also, effectively installing taxpayer funded slush funds for Pritzker to dole out to connected Democrats for favors isn’t anything to boast about from a good government standpoint.
Pritzker is only governor on account of his crooked family’s billions of dollars of generational tax evasion — safety locked away in offshore tax dodge banks