Chicago’s 2020 budget proposal was never truly balanced

By Adam Schuster, Bill Reveille
11/26/2019
Faced with the impossible task of balancing Chicago’s budget without pension reform, Mayor Lori Lightfoot is forced to partially rely on phantom cuts and revenues.

TAGS: bonds, budget, CAFR: Comprehensive Annual Financial Report, Chicago, Chicago City Council, Chicago City Hall, constitutional amendment, CTA: Chicago Transit Authority, CTU: Chicago Teachers Union, deficit, emergency fee, homelessness, housing market, ILGA: Illinois General Assembly, interest rates, library, Lori Lightfoot, Lyft, property taxes, Rahm Emanuel, real estate, real estate transfer tax, tax hikes, tax increase, TIF: Tax Increment Financing, Uber

Chicago takes pole position in race for Obama library, no tax dollars required

By Jane McEnaney
09/16/2014
On Sept. 15, the Barack Obama Foundation announced four semifinalists in the battle to build Barack Obama’s presidential library and museum. The four potential host sites include the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois at Chicago, Columbia University in New York City and the University of Hawaii. Holding two of the four slots, the...

TAGS: Barack Obama, library, Obama presidential library, taxes

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Illinois Forward: A 5-year plan for balanced budgets, declining debt and tax relief

The years 2010 through 2019 will go down in Illinois history as a decade of public policy failure and economic decline. High fixed costs for pensions and government worker health care have prevented the state from balancing its budget in any year since 2001. Since the Great Recession in 2008, the state’s fiscal imbalance has...

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Ifeoma Nkemdi

Policy lessons from Illinois’ exodus of people and money

By J. Scott Moody, Wendy Warcholik
07/07/2014

CBS Chicago: Illinois’ highest-paid superintendent receives $400K per year to oversee 1,200 students

By Ted Dabrowski
05/02/2016