* Click here to see the Liberty Principles PAC A-1.
Uihlein gave Liberty Principles PAC $1.5 million in June. He’s given a total of $17 million to the PAC since 2014. And he’s given Proft’s personal campaign committee another $595K over the years.
…Adding… Uihlein is a bigger GOP sugar daddy than Gov. Rauner…
— Illinois Working Together (@IllinoisWorking) August 3, 2018
…Adding… Gov. Rauner reports raising $411,500. And the House Republicans kicked $500K of their $2 million from Rauner back to the ILGOP, likely for mailers.
Chicago is looking at the feasibility of bond financing as a way to stabilize funding for its four retirement systems, the city’s chief financial officer said on Thursday.
The city’s unfunded pension liability is $28 billion, down from $35 billion last year. That liability and chronic budget deficits have resulted in low credit ratings and high borrowing costs.
“I’m at a point where I feel like we need to look at (options) seriously and see whether or not there is a financing plan that would meet the kind of objections the mayor would have, our (city) council would have, the rating agencies would have,” CFO Carole Brown told reporters. […]
Sacks raised the idea of securitizing about $950 million of city revenue to raise $10 billion for pensions, boosting the funded ratio to 54 percent from the currently low 26 percent.
The Government Finance Officers Association recommends against the use of pension obligation bonds. Several recent Chapter 9 cases have cast a pall over POBs as investors suffered greater losses than pensioners did and some analysts have suggested that POBs contribute to distress. Chicago’s use of its securitization structure would give bondholders more protection. […]
The city last year established the Sales Tax Securitization Corp. and the City Council has approved up to $3 billion in sales tax and general obligation refundings. The city issued $704 million last year, $680 earlier this year, and has plans this fall to sell $750 million.
Other revenues, like the city’s share of local government shared revenue and personal property replacement and motor fuel taxes, could be leveraged. Critics have said diverting those revenues from the corporate fund damages GO value. […]
There’s also the gamble posed by the arbitrage play given that borrowing rates remain low but the proceeds would be invested in an expensive equities market with the risk that future returns won’t exceed the bonds’ interest.
The arbitrage play is a risk here, as well as dedicating existing revenues for years in advance.
The core of the idea is that city pension fund managers currently assume they’ll make 7 percent to 7.5 percent a year on their investments, and figure that assumed return into the actuarial projections that are the basis for what taxpayers pay to the funds each year. Since the funds now have $28 billion in “debt”—the unfunded liability—the city and its taxpayers are effectively paying 7 percent to 7.5 percent interest on the shortfall, Brown says. So, if the city can borrow at a cheaper rate of perhaps 5 percent to 5.5 percent and turn the money over to the pension funds immediately, the end cost to taxpayers will drop. […]
But Brown and Sacks insist the city won’t make the error the Blagojevich administration did, when savings from the POB were used to substitute for normal state pension payments, driving up total debt long term. Savings from this plan could be big enough that the city will be able to make its entire normal annual contribution, but at a lesser rate because the pension funds would have more to invest, Brown contended. Nor would the city’s financial flexibility be reduced much because, after recent changes in law, debt payments “are just as hard of an obligation as our bond debt.”
It’s basically converting pension fund debt to market debt. But that’s a lot of money.
ICYMI: Betsy Dirksen Londrigan’s Campaign Falsely Claims Her as a ‘Small Business Owner’
“This is just another example of Londrigan deceiving voters and saying anything to get elected. Voters in Central Illinois deserve better than someone deceiving them in an attempt to earn their vote.” - Travis Sterling, Illinois Republican Party Executive Director
Betsy Dirksen Londigran’s campaign for Congress has spent the past year claiming that Londrigan is a small business owner and an entrepreneur. Her campaign website touts her as a “self-employed entrepreneur - giving her firsthand knowledge of the challenges faced by the small business and self-employed workers.”
When asked to elaborate by a local reporter, her response revealed that she has clearly been attempting to pad her resume to get votes. Londrigan was unable to name the business she owned and failed to provide any additional details to clarify her small business owner claims.
After being pressed by the WCIA’s Mark Maxwell, Londrigan finally admitted that she “had no employees” and was not an “employer.” The interview continues:
Maxwell: “So you had a job, but you weren’t necessarily a job creator?”
Londrigan: “I wasn’t an employer, no.”
…
Maxwell: “So I just want to make sure I’m clear. A lot of people say they’re entrepreneurs and that means they’re job creators. But at no time during this 20 year span you described did you have employees or a payroll.”
Londrigan: “I didn’t manage a payroll other than my own.”
Nevada regulators and industry insiders say the state’s first year of broad marijuana legalization has exceeded even their highest expectations, with sales and tax collections already surpassing year-end projections by 25 percent.
Numbers from June are still outstanding but are expected to push taxable sales past $500 million, netting total tax revenue in the neighborhood of $70 million — with about $25 million devoted to schools. […]
A legal battle over distribution licenses made for a rocky start last July, but Nevada’s $195 million in sales for the first six months dwarfed the totals in Washington state ($67 million) and Colorado ($114 million) for the first half-year of legal sales in those states in 2014. And so far, there’s no sign legal sales that began in California on Jan. 1 have cut into business in neighboring Nevada, regulators say.
$195 million in sales in the first six months and $300 million in the second half. Extrapolate that out and we might be looking at ≈$2.4 billion in annual sales here. Or not. There could be some differences. They have a lot of tourists there (although no public consumption is allowed, according to the article).
The resulting tax revenues won’t totally solve any problems, but they won’t hurt, either.
* The Question: What do you think Illinois should do with marijuana tax revenues if legalization is ever approved? Don’t forget to explain your answer, please. Thanks.
In a march that shut down a portion of Lake Shore Drive during rush hour and ended with prayers and speeches outside of Wrigley Field, hundreds of anti-violence protesters marched in Chicago on Thursday evening to demand that the city invest in its impoverished neighborhoods and to call for the resignations of Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson. […]
“It’s a tale of two cities,” Rev. Gregory Livingston, another lead organizer, explained to USA Today. “One of the hardest things to do is inspire the uninspired. Sometimes you have to stick your neck out, have some skin in the game and get people to recognize that there are some people here are that trying to do something.”
* Hundreds of protesters?…
About 150 people marched from Lake Shore Drive to Wrigley, stay tuned for updates. https://t.co/gRaWSBLLUr
* They did shut down LSD and they got a lot of media coverage (some people claimed there may have been more cops, reporters and onlookers than protesters), but the organizers failed miserably to convince many demonstrators to show up…
The crowd was not as large as it should have been. Imagine the strength of hundreds, even thousands, of people marching in harmony to end the violence that has led to more than 1,500 shootings so far this year. But a disagreement among community leaders over the goals of the march — specifically calls for the resignations of Mayor Rahm Emanuel and police Superintendent Eddie Johnson — splintered the African-American community.
But the activists and preachers and organizers who have started bringing their protests out of the shadows, the ones prepared to make life difficult in places where things are easy — they’re on to something. For too long, this violence has endured. For too long, powerful people in this city have ignored it while politicians have offered up wildly incomplete solutions to win votes.
Anyone who has tuned out the deadly day-in-and-day-out toll on the streets of our city needs to be rattled, needs to be made to feel uncomfortable. Cries of help from street corners most will never pass have, of course, gone unheard.
What choice remains but to get louder, to force others to notice?
Those white and yellow chalk slogans on Lake Shore Drive will vanish quickly.
But I hope, as the Rev. Livingston said, that these protests have only just begun.
Maybe Livingston, who was Willie Wilson’s spokesman in his last mayoral campaign, isn’t the one to lead these protests is all I’m saying…
And despite all the premarch publicity, some caught up in the congestion were taken by surprise. Stevenson Renee of Bronzeville on the South Side sat in traffic at Clark and Belmont. He said he understood the concerns of those protesting, even though he hadn’t heard about the event until he became entangled in it.
“This is all new to me,” Renee said. “I didn’t know anything about this.”
The fact that protesters could bring neighborhoods like Lincoln Park, Lakeview and Wrigleyville to a standstill during rush hour signaled the beginning of a different movement, according to activists, to “redistribute the pain in Chicago.”
African-Americans often take to the streets in their own neighborhoods, recently shutting down the Dan Ryan Expressway on the South Side. While such protests send a message to criminals that law-abiding residents will not concede defeat, they do not beckon people on the other side of town to stand with them in the fight.
Illinois has replaced an arcane state law dating to post-Prohibition days that required businesses to get approval from the state to serve alcohol within 100 feet of a church or school.
Gov. Bruce Rauner on Thursday signed the new law, which allows local authorities to hand out exemptions to the state’s Liquor Control Law of 1934 that limits where alcohol sales can take place. Previously, it took an act of the General Assembly and approval of the governor to grant an exemption.
Rauner said the change was “a clear example of bipartisan cooperation in Springfield to reform a broken system.”
“Entrepreneurs should not have to pass a state law to open a new business,” he said.
This was a much-needed piece of legislation. The whole process was ridiculous.
State Rep. Sara Feigenholtz, D-Chicago, said one business had to wait a year to get a bill through the state legislature to get a liquor license. She said it didn’t make sense to require farmers in southern Illinois to sound off on a liquor license request for a Chicago business.
“Sixty-eight pages of the 72-page liquor control act are exemptions,” Feigenholtz said. “Today, we end that.” […]
Rauner said he has pushed hard to give control back to local governments since he took office in 2015.
“I actually vetoed two license requests to try and force the change because business was being browbeaten to come to Springfield,” Rauner said. “I said, ‘stop this, no more.’”
Rauner, without naming names, said some state politicians used the 1934 state law to play politics or to get campaign contributions.
* That’s not all Rauner said. When asked if there was any opposition to the bill, Rauner said…
There was opposition. I’ve been fighting for it since I became governor. This has sort of been the law for decades. It’s a way for elected officials to sort of muck around in local politics and maybe get some more campaign contributions or pressure folks to have to come and ask a favor. If you have to force to get a favor then you can get some other political favors. It’s a way that politics gets into the local level. We need to eliminate that, cut the red tape, get Springfield off the backs of our local communities and off of our local business owners. That’s what I’ve fought for every day.
If we can do the same thing that we do on this for things like consolidate local governments, or streamlining procurement or competitive bidding or contracting, get Springfield off the backs of local communities, we’ll bring down our property taxes and we’ll grow even more jobs.
* Other stuff…
* New laws streamline getting into Illinois nursing homes and staying there: Low-income seniors, the disabled and their families will find it easier to apply for and keep Medicaid benefits for long-term nursing home care as a result of two Senate bills signed Thursday by Gov. Bruce Rauner. Rauner signed SB 2385 and SB 2913 at Amberwood Care Center before dozens of attendees, including legislators and representatives of 19 Rockford-area nursing homes.
* Rauner signs laws aimed at nursing-home Medicaid backlog: He also signed a law eliminating the need for annual Medicaid re-determination in cases where financial circumstances have not changed. This comes after a nursing home in Girard had to close because it was fronting the cost of $2 million worth of Medicaid.
* Illinois Governor OKs Allowing Medical Cannabis at Schools: The law does authorize a school to prohibit dispensing the drug if administrators determine it would create a “disruption to the school’s educational environment” or if it would expose other students to the product.
Charlie Kirk is the 24-year-old founder of Turning Point USA, a conservative nonprofit whose 130,000 members claim to be “culture warriors” in the fight “to save Western civilization” from liberals, writes Adam Rubenstein for The Weekly Standard.
Why it matters: With more than 650,000 Twitter followers and the sworn fealty of some of Washington’s most prominent conservatives, Kirk is a provocative firebrand whose proclaimed goal of “owning the libs” all-too-perfectly captures the present state of Donald Trump’s base. Kirk’s messaging and networking in conservative circles has been so effective, in fact, that he claims TPUSA will have raised $15 million by the end of 2018.
The backdrop: Kirk founded TPUSA in 2012, opting not to attend Baylor University and instead use his “rhetorical gifts” to launch a conservative, youth-focused organization with the financial backing of investor Foster Friess and Bruce Rauner, now the Republican governor of Illinois. […]
The big picture: Critics have called Kirk a provocateur — pointing to misleading and outright false tweets that drum up outrage like, “83%, 10 out of 12, of all rapes in Denmark are committed by migrants or their descendants.” But the reality is that Kirk’s influence in Trumpworld is unbridled, and as the 24-year-old leader of a growing movement of right-wing, “own the libs”-driven populism, he won’t be disappearing anytime soon.
Rauner gave Kirk’s group $100,000 in 2014 and then another $50K in 2015.
“Owning the libs” is one of the constants of the summit. This form of political schadenfreude is a big part of the TPUSA playbook. The term originated in campus pranks designed to upset, i.e., “trigger,” liberals. “Trigger the libs” quickly morphed into “owning” them. At the University of New Mexico, a TPUSA group in 2017 held an “affirmative action bake sale” where it charged Asians more than whites and whites more than blacks. The bake sale is suggested in the eighth section of TPUSA’s “chapter handbook.” Other ideas include creating your own “safe space” or constructing a “unionized hot dog stand” to show the excesses of liberalism. At Kent State the same year, members of the TPUSA chapter wore diapers in a simulated safe space. It’s the triumph of the put-down as political principle.
“Owning the libs is easy,” Bak says. “It’s fun. It’s my favorite pastime.” He came to the conference to be among like-minded people. He’s heading to Temple University in the fall to study medicine. He doesn’t yet know if there’s a TPUSA chapter on Temple’s campus, but “if they don’t have one, I will definitely start one. I’ll be happy to.” Bak thinks Trump has fared pretty well in his first two years: “I mean, the numbers speak for themselves. The economy, the way it is, a lot of people who are negative towards him in his presidency don’t really know how good of a job he’s actually doing compared to past presidents.” His favorite book is Nineteen Eighty-Four, which he sees as relevant today, “with everyone misrepresenting facts.”
Charlie Kirk himself made a similar journey. Initially he supported Scott Walker for president and then turned to Cruz. The decision that many Republicans faced during the general election—to brace for Trump or to embrace him—Kirk took with unqualified enthusiasm. TPUSA identifies itself as conservative but nonpartisan and holds the self-proclaimed remit to “identify, educate, train, and organize students to promote the principles of fiscal responsibility, free markets, and limited government.” It is a mission that suggests some dissent from the Trump agenda. But Kirk tells me that it is not his job to criticize those with whom he agrees “on the big things.” Maybe that’s the price of politics today—one can’t call balls and strikes anymore without attracting the enmity of fellow conservatives. Intra-party debate on the right is “sinking one’s own ship” or “siding with Hillary.” Kirk happily rationalizes every aspect of the Trump administration and its policies. Protective tariffs? Trade wasn’t free to begin with, and Trump is making it more free: “Fair and free,” Kirk insists. He does add the caveat, though, that he usually wouldn’t support tariffs.
* Bernie Schoenburg has written about the Rauner connection to Kirk several times. From June of last year…
The Rauner Family Foundation, which provides charitable contributions from Rauner and his wife, DIANA, gave Turning Point USA $100,000 in 2014 and $50,000 in 2015. Rauner was keynote speaker at a Turning Point event, a 2014 group newsletter said. Rauner called Kirk “one of the greatest patriots and one of the greatest advocates for limited government and great conservative principles in the entire United States. … I think the world of this young man. He’s a superstar. I personally will do everything I can to help him expand his reach … because his vision of America is the right vision for America.”
Audio of part of that speech is here. “The American dream will be brought back with Charlie Kirk leading the message, leading the charge for all of us,” Rauner said.
The group that hosted a high school leadership summit that featured Attorney General Jeff Sessions laughing and repeating “lock her up” chants from students has ties to Illinois and has been supported by Gov. Bruce Rauner. […]
The “lock her up” chant at the event Tuesday in Washington, D.C., refers to Hillary Clinton, the Democratic candidate who lost to Republican President Donald Trump in 2016. It was a staple of Trump campaign rallies as the FBI investigated Clinton’s use of a private email server. She was never charged with a crime. […]
Turning Point USA seeks to mobilize students who believe in free markets and limited government. Kirk has tweeted statements including “There is no such thing as ‘government money’ … It is OUR money the government TOOK FROM US! #TaxationIsTheft” and “The #1 reason poor kids stay poor is failing schools run by the corrupt teacher unions. They only care about their power. Time for change!” […]
Rauner’s campaign had no comment when asked about Sessions on Wednesday.
* The Rauner campaign has been counting down the last 100 days of the race with a daily press release. I’ve been putting them in the live coverage post, but I thought we’d discuss this one…
95 Days Left: Pritzker Wants to Take Away Opportunity From Low-Income Children
August is here and Illinois students will be heading back to school soon, but JB Pritzker wants to take away a program providing educational choice to low-income families.
Despite his plans to raise taxes without saying how high, Pritzker has been adamant that he would immediately eliminate the Invest In Kids tax credit scholarship program.
The Invest In Kids Program provides opportunity for children and families who want the ability to choose the best educational option for their children. The scholarship program is the first in Illinois history, and is a cornerstone of the new education funding formula bill.
Here’s what the Chicago Tribune’s Kristen McQueary had to say when Pritzker said he would get rid of scholarships: “let’s give Pritzker the benefit of the doubt. He didn’t know what he was saying. He doesn’t understand the program. It’s the only plausible explanation. Why? Because the other explanation is that a billionaire candidate for governor is willing to impose a lower education standard on poor families that he would never tolerate for his own.”
Pritzker wants to take away educational opportunity for low-income families, but has no problem pushing tax hikes on Illinoisans while dodging his own taxes. Check out what he said during his April press conference:
Reporter: What happens to the tuition tax credits if you should win?
The Pritzker folks flatly denied a media report the other day that he might be wavering on the scholarship program.
* Just $40 million has been received so far in what was supposed to be a $100 million scholarship program. All but $3 million or so has come from northern Illinois contributors, and almost three-quarters of the cash has been donated by people in Chicago and suburban Cook County.
