-- 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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Drive over to Aurora’s casino, and check-out the patrons. Notion of “high-class” casino patronage is silly. Chicago/Michigan City/Aurora tennis-shoe clad slot-machine playing bus-riding seniors patron-base is not Monte Carlo crowd. Surely City Hall folks don’t think planeloads of foreign tourists will arrive to play. Chicago’s out-of-control crime-rate has been well-reported overseas, and likely puts a BIG damper on tourism for foreseeable future.
A weekend night at Rivers – IL’s flagship and most profitable casino – is a sad sight to see. A crowd of degenerate gamblers gambling away rent, car payments and social security payments. The casino attracted so few in the young hip crowd they closed the nightclub and turned it into a sportsbook. I haven’t visited the sportsbook yet but my guess it’s a bunch of old timers gambling away their childrens’ inheritance.
Gambling tends to be more of an addiciton among people who feel generally helpless and without any reasonable hope otherwise of having a better life, don’t you think? Yes, we can castigate such people, but who among us has felt that level of continuing over-riding despair in our lives? Its hard to realistically judge a person unless you’ve “walked a mile in his moccasins.” So, it makes at least some sense to them even while it makes almost no sense to you.
McCormick Place East is underutilized. Have been to plenty of conventions at McCormick Place in the last few years…always at McCormick Place west.
The McCormick Place casino may not turn out to be the tourist and conventioneer trap that they hope it will be. It may end up being an upscale casino with low class patrons, and just as River North has degraded considerably in the last two years, a McCormick Place casino may scare away conventioneers as the riff-raff becomes difficult to control