Monthly Archives: October 2015

Are You Going To Get A Break On Illinois & Lake County Property Taxes? More news on tax. Mayor Rahm Emanuel plotted a tax hike for property, but insiders are gossiping that if you’re a middle class owner, your burden may plummet. It is the same old reason. Soaring pension payments and a chilling budget deficit caused the mayor, earlier this month, to jack property taxes to $450 million to cover unpaid liabilities for the police and firefighter pensions, plus $50 million for the Chicago Public Schools. The result: a proposed record-breaking $500 million property tax gift. US Effective Tax Rates by Income This is the highest yet since 1996. It is 50 percent more than we paid in property taxes five years ago. It raises our tax rate from $774.4 million in 2014 to $1.22 billion Ironically – and of small consolation to Chicagoans – the mayor’s [...]

Sorry, Owners: Illinois Small Business Is Not Too Friendly For You. If you’re planning to set up shop in Illinois, think again. Thumbtack shows that our local government innocently makes some things very, very hard for us. Last week, Thumbtack ran its fourth annual Small Business Friendliness Survey on 18,000 small business owners across the nations. They considered the following: • Ease of starting a business • Ease of hiring • Regulations • Health and safety • Employment, labor and hiring • Tax code • Licensing • Environmental • Zoning • Training and networking programs Jon Lieber said, chief economist of Thumbtack.com “Given that there is a crisis of entrepreneurship in the United States, seen in the broad collapse of self-employment across industries and states, creating the right environment for business start-ups is more important than ever.” Merchant St in Decatur IL New Hampshire, Utah, Louisiana, and Colorado [...]

Last month, we mentioned that Newsweek selected ten high-schools that they rated to be the best in the North Shore area. Not to be ignored, this week we turn our attention to colleges. Forbes ranks colleges according to what students get out of them. It evaluates them according to five factors: • Student Satisfaction (25 percent) • Post-Graduate Success (32.5 percent) • Student Debt (25 percent) • Four-year Graduation Rate (7.5 percent) • Academic Success (10 percent) Illinois Top Colleges Forbes 2015 concluded that the 17 best colleges in our state are the following: 1. Northwestern University (#16) 2. University of Chicago (#20) 3. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (#68) 4. Wheaton College (#86) 5. Knox College (#165) 6. Bradley University (#251) 7. Illinois Wesleyan University (#253) 8. Illinois Institute of Technology (#256) 9. Augustana College (#284) 10. DePaul University (#291) 11. Loyola University Chicago (#294) 12. Lake Forest [...]