Wirepoints President Ted Dabrowski appeared on ABC 8 in the Quad Cities. The appearance comes just days after Moody’s double-notch credit downgrade of East Moline, putting the city’s credit rating two spots above junk. One reason cited for the change in credit rating was East Moline’s plan to issue pension obligation bonds. After the downgrade, Rock Island County decided to nix its plans to issue bonds to pay for its pensions.
Wirepoints Pieces:
Weekly crime statistics from the Chicago Police Department: Report through 5/4/2024.
Gov. JB Pritzker calls it “ethics” reform.
It’s rare to see city leaders in Chicago take an open, unabashed stance on the collapse of literacy. To complain is deemed as too political, too racist or too anti-public schools. So it’s refreshing to see Willie Wilson, a successful businessman and leader of the black community, call for a literacy initiative “with the goal of getting 100% of Black students reading at grade level.”
While this new advisory referendum could be nothing more than a political distraction, it could also be that lawmakers are gauging Illinoisans’ appetite for another bite at a progressive income tax hike – this time with lower property taxes as a sweetener.
At $1.5 million per job, the new incentive package from the state is at least 15 times the norm. For this much money, the state could have just handed out a million bucks to 827 people, instead of creating 550 jobs.
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Hurray for Wirepoints for getting on this plan early on. I think you had a lot to do with the city backing off.
Who cares just barrow on everything you can, the money is all fake, if you need more the fed will just print some up. So seriously who cares.
Moody’s considers pension obligation bonds to be a bigger credit risk than the unfunded pension liabilities (net pension liabilities). Once again, there are many reasons why a City may have a large unfunded pension liability. The state passed legislative pension benefit hikes, while pensions were already underfunded (state mandate to local government). The state passed collective bargaining legislation (state mandate to local government) which provided more negotiation power to public sector unions, used for instance to negotiate better salaries and benefits. Bigger salaries result in bigger employer pension contributions, while pensions were already underfunded, causing a larger unfunded liability. The… Read more »