Recently I visited my friend to see their new baby and they had fantastic views of the city looking west and north. Not a bad photo from my iPhone 6… my iPhone 5 and 4 cameras were terrible.
Cross posted at LITGM
Sunset in Chicago
Chicagoania
St. Patrick’s Day and Journalism
I’m going to combine two posts here that don’t sound like they’d go well together – “Day Drinking” and lazy journalism. There was an article by Stanley Bing (the pseudonym of an executive who writes for Fortune magazine) who happens to 1) be an actual business executive 2) writes effectively (and hilariously). While I can’t find the exact post I am paraphrasing below:
Whenever I see anything written about my company in the popular press, it is generally incorrect. Thus I must conclude that most of what I see written about other companies in the press isn’t right, either.
Business Insider is a great resource that I read on my iPhone most days when I have a few minutes to kill. They have some original content and re-post from other sources. Recently I read about the “five biggest” St. Patricks’ day celebrations (parties) which was a typical “puff piece” article for them – you can see it here.
The only problem with this article is… that it is lazy and wrong. Our own correspondent Dan happened to be on the ground in Las Vegas for St. Patrick’s day last year and he said it was “Chicago on an inter-galactic scale” which I believe since Dan has been at a ton of drinking events through being a sports fan forever. I am having trouble verifying this on the ol’ intertubes but it is the kind of event where “hey, the Chicago River is green, we can trot this story out every year, there we are done” but the massive scale of Las Vegas means that if you have a drinking event they can just pour out of the hotels and onto the streets (that they shut down) and go crazy and drink outdoors. Probably the only way to officially verify this is to send Art Mann out to Las Vegas as the ultimate decider…
Onto Chicago for St. Patrick’s day… we had a beautiful day and so everyone was out in force. People were lining up per usual in the wee hours (many bars open at 6am) for a long day of drinking here in River North.
I loved this outfit… a drunk gumby up at Paris Club!
We’re Getting Closer
In this post I described how Illinois could “fix itself” financially… however my more realistic post here discusses how Illinois is tilted precariously on the edge of a crisis and I believe that one major issue impacting a large entity could kick off the entire process of “going Detroit” and “paging Kevin Orr”.
Recently the City of Chicago, facing ratings downgrades, almost triggered off some swaps payments that would come due if the credit rating was to fall down to a certain low level. Per the article:
Chicago drew closer to a fiscal free fall on Friday with a rating downgrade from Moody’s Investors Service that could trigger the immediate termination of four interest-rate swap agreements, costing the city about $58 million and raising the prospect of more broken swaps contracts.
The city was able to re-negotiate one of the swap agreements and was in talks with Wells Fargo about the other swaps agreement per this article. Apparently the date of reckoning has been pushed out a little further.
The Chicago Public Schools (CPS) debt is now just one grade above “junk” status per this article.
In making the downgrade, Moody’s cited the school district’s reliance on reserve funds for “operating expenditures, particularly pension contributions, which will steadily increase in the coming years.”Moody’s also maintained its “negative outlook” on the district’s debt, again citing the rising pension costs. From 2013 to 2016, annual retirement costs will increase to $688 million from $197 million, Moody’s stated in its rating explanation.
Note that the budget that Rauner proposed for the state of Illinois had additional cuts for state and local government, at a time when each of them are crying to the state for relief. These cuts are also due to Rauner’s choice to let the state income tax surcharge expire rather than renewing it (as Quinn certainly would have done). Per this article:
Governor Rauner’s office released a statement Wednesday afternoon, saying: “Governor Rauner had to make some hard decisions to balance a $6 billion budget shortfall caused by years of fiscal neglect and bad practices. The amount of money transferred to local governments has ballooned by more than 40 percent in the last decade and the reduction to local governments proposed in the budget puts Illinois in line with neighboring states. In Governor Rauner’s budget proposal, Chicago’s overall revenues are reduced by less than 2.5 percent. Through the local government task force, Governor Rauner is committed to working with local communities to reduce costs and give them increased flexibility. Additionally, as part of his Turnaround Agenda, the governor proposed empowering local residents with tools to control costs at the local level and get more value for their tax dollars.”
It will be very interesting to see how this all plays out. Today the various governmental units and branches of our legislature and the governor are circling and eyeing each other to see who blinks first.
Some day hopefully we can move beyond the “funding” discussion into a real discussion of how we can get our state in fiscal order; by encouraging our government to be more productive, by scaling back our obligations to unions, and by unshackling entrepreneurs in the state to create jobs and companies. No one is talking about that yet… except Rauner.
Cross posted at LITGM
Rauner’s budget-Is any of this going to happen ?
An interesting take on the new Illinois governor’s shot across the bow.
The Sun-Times doesn’t like it.
If we thought Gov. Bruce Rauner’s first proposed state budget stood a chance of becoming reality, we would be appalled.
Talk about cold. Rauner wants to eviscerate dozens of programs that serve the poorest and most defenseless among us.
C’mon, cutting tuition aid to orphans?
If the Sun-Times is anything like it was the last time I lived in Chicago, a long time ago, this is no surprise. It defined limousine liberal then with Marshall Field the owner.
Marshall Field III (September 28, 1893 November 8, 1956) was an American investment banker, publisher, racehorse owner/breeder, philanthropist, heir to the Marshall Field department store fortune and a leading financial supporter and founding board member of Saul Alinsky’s community organizing network Industrial Areas Foundation.
I don’t know if things have changed the last 50 years.
But the governor’s fiscal year 2016 budget has zero chance of being passed into law by the Illinois General Assembly, as he well knows. Its real value then, which we’d like to believe is by design, is to sound the alarm like never before that Illinois is sliding fast toward becoming an economic backwater, a failed state among the 50 states. Time is running out. Hard and painful measures must be taken now.
If Rauner’s draconian plan has achieved that much, we’d say it’s about time.
That sounds promising. Maybe 50 years of economic stagnation has made a difference. Chicago is doing fine as far as the “Near North” part of it although a woman was raped in broad daylight across the street from my niece’s apartment two weeks ago. She is a nurse on the transplant team at Rush Medical Center and should carry a gun but we all know about Chicago and guns. Only gangsters are allowed guns.
Following that, we would expect to see a hard but healthy give-and-take, like nothing we have seen in decades, between the executive and legislative branches. And, in the end, Illinois might finally settle on a long-term spending and revenue plan that puts the state on a path toward solvency and growth for decades to come.
Hey, we can hope.
This sounds more realistic than I have ever heard from the Sun-Times. Is this progress? The little I know about the Tribune these days is not any more promising.
And Wisconsin lefties thought Walker was bad !
I’m sitting out here in La La land with Jerry Brown and 1/3 of the illegal immigrants in the US watching Los Angeles implode.
My wife needed to renew her drivers’ license on her birthday, January 13. Unfortunately, January 1, was the day that illegal aliens were eligible for drivers’ licenses. As a result, the first day she could get an appointment, as opposed to waiting all day in line, was today more than a month later. Unfortunately, she had pneumonia last week and came home Sunday. Today she felt too weak to go to her DMV office and called to reschedule. The next date she could get an appointment was in April.
I’m not sure Illinois is any better but at least somebody is trying to do something about it.
Mike Lotus Spoke to the University of Chicago Law School Federalist Society Student Chapter on February 3, 2015 About “America 3.0 and the Future of the Legal Profession”
Huge thanks to the University of Chicago Law School Federalist Society Student Chapter on Tuesday, who invited me to speak to their group on February 3, 2015. I previously spoke at the Booth School of Business, which was also a thrill. I am most grateful for the opportunity to speak at the University of Chicago, my undergraduate alma mater.
The event was well-attended. I attribute this in part to the drawing power of the free buffet of Indian food, and not exclusively to the appeal of the speaker. The students were attentive and asked good questions. I understand that audio of the talk will be available at some point. I will post a link when it is available.
My topic was “America 3.0 and the Future of the Legal Profession”.
First I spoke about some of the themes from America 3.0: Rebooting American Prosperity in the 21st Century, Why America’s Greatest Days are Yet to Come, which I coauthored with James C. Bennett. I discussed the cultural foundations of American prosperity and freedom, the role of our legal profession in American history, in particular in adapting to technological changes, I then discussed some of the major technological changes which are now sweeping our nation and the world. I said that some of them will be general purpose technologies which will cause changes on the scale of the steam engine, railroads or computing itself.