Posted on 10/27/2012 10:07:43 AM PDT by Kaslin
This could get very interesting,very fast.
I drove around Dallas on vacation and then drove back to Chicago. It’s striking how all the roads and bridges in Chicago look so old by comparison.
Earlier this year there was a long article from an urban planning journal that said the talk in that industry was how precipitously Chicago had declined in the last decade by almost every measure.
Daley abandoned ship at the right time for him.
You drop the same climate on top of Dallas and you'd get the same sort of surfaces, particularly if you used salt to clear the ice.
A major trend in the next five-ten years will be baby boomers deciding where to live when it is time to retire (and they don’t need to commute any more).
One factor they will look at is _future_ local and state tax rates.
The only elderly left living in Illinois in ten years could be Medicaid recipients—and think about what that will do for local and state revenues vs spending.
Illinois does not have a lot of time left to fix this.
FReepers like to beat up on Detroit but its going to look like a utopia compared to Chicago when somebody finally cuts the umbilical.
I can’t wait for the day all those LINK cards stop working.
This year Illinois taxpayers will contribute $14.15 million to the General Assembly Retirement System. Under new accounting rules from Moody’s, the Illinois legislature’s pension system is only 13 percent funded.
From the below link when I researching Obama’s pension.
http://illinoispolicy.org/blog/blog.asp?articlesource=5166
Wonder if the legislators will forgoe their pensions /sarcasm
It’s been like that for a long time. Winter is rough on roads. Chicago has plenty of it, Dallas not so much. Chicago on the whole is a much older place, too. Chicago is well kept compared to Philadelphia, though. There are sections in town where it is impossible to dodge the steel plates bolted over giant potholes. There’s something very Blade Runner-ish about crossing that bridge ocer the Schuykill into New Jersey. Maybe it’s all the barrel fires and street bums in every nook and cranny. Had a flat tire with a rental car on that bridge once. I wouldn’t stop until I got off the bridge and to something clean and well lit. I’d never seen a Pep Boys store at the time but man was I ever relieved.
DETROIT II ...without the baseball team.
Same in Buffalo, and Detroit. One of the things that has always bugged me about “investing in infrastructure” was that governments should be maintainng roads and bridges on a contiuous basis. There are ostensibly plenty of dedicated revenue sources to keep these thing in good repair (fuel taxes, registration fees, tolls, milage fees, etc). Yet the liberals have to raid these revenue streams to fund their welfare state. As Maggie Thatcher once famously said, sooner or later you run out of other people’s money. Socialists raid funds meant for infrastructure maintenance, they tax everything that moves, and some things that don’t, they borrow until the lending window slams shut, and they still need more. THEN they try to tell you that borrowing money to upgrade infrastucture is some wonderful, bold initiative. It is, in my opinion, a damning indication of poor stewardship on the part of government.
Richard Daley is a common criminal, a thief, who got out one step ahead of the law. We still have common criminals in charge, Rahm Emanuel, and worst of all Barack Obama.
In the suburbs,rural Illinois, WI, IA the infrastucture doesn't look rusty and crumbly.
..even in Illinois.
The only thing that you can conclude from this is that the majority of the voters who actually go vote like the government that they elected. I would suppose that they don't give a rat's ass that the Ill government is broke and getting broker. They have no idea, nor do they seemingly care, what happens when Ill cannot pay their payroll, let alone their supplier bills.
Maybe someday even the moron level voter will finally realize that if they keep electing lunatics to run things, they will keep getting lunatic policies.
...but...*sigh*.... maybe not
The company that owns Jewel food stores is up for sale,and their stock has gone from about $50 to about $2.50 in the last several years. Let's see what happens to the grocery business when those link cards stop working.
All this after the GOP hack/criminal govenor Ryan spent billions on roads.
Wal-Mart cashier in Skokie,IL told me that 90% of their food customers use LINK cards!
Whole Foods cashier in Evanston,IL told me 2/3 of their customers use LINK cards!
Ten years ago, after I got creamed by the prices at Navy Pier, I vowed I would never again choose to go to Chicago for entertainment (I occasionally acquiesce to somebody else in a group.)
A friend who loves Chicago, told me that he would never live their again with the way they kill you with parking and traffic tickets.
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