-- Connecting the dots between our economy, government and business --
Convention business in Springfield, and hotel occupancy rates, have returned to levels seen before the COVID-19 pandemic, Springfield Convention and Visitors Bureau director Scott Dahl said. And even amid talk of a recession later this year, he said, "I can't imagine that the convention market is going to dry up."
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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Springfield tourism isn’t going to happen. I bet you most CPS students don’t know that Springfield is the capital of Illinois. Heck, most CPS students of hispanic origin I’ve meet in my life can’t even pronounce Illinois correctly. They pronounce Illinois with the ‘s’ at the end. Think about that for a second, these people live here their entire life, born and raised here, or have lived here during their formative years, but can’t properly say Illinois. It’s disheartening, really.
You can see the Lincoln stuff in a day, no need to even stay overnight. Springfield is is just another dumpy depressing downstate IL town, anyways…
That mispronunciation thing hits me hard every time I hear it. I know a guy who pronounces the word thin to sound the same as the word tin. A woman I know pronounces the word both to sound the same as if it were bode. Both are elderly. One attended public schools and the other Catholic schools, and neither went to college. There are all sorts of similar not-quite-right ways people pronounce common words. Two thoughts occur to me almost literally every time. First, how is it even possible any such word can be common and has to have been… Read more »
Some who read my remarks might say that each of the people mentioned simply had trouble making the “th” sound correctly. But, in both cases I can’t recall hearing any problem with that sound when saying other words. That may have been the case, but the only words I consistently heard where that particular sound occurred incorrectly and repeatedly so. But, for those who know such cases and tink otherwise let me say “tank youse.”