This week I take up, and just as quickly put down, the question of a graduated income tax for Illinois. Not many states have a flat rate tax on incomes. Illinois does so for reasons that have nothing to do with economic efficiency or philosophical principle. The flat rate was a constraint of 1870 constitution. […]
James Krohe Jr.
Posted inOpinion
From the Credit Where Credit Is Due Dept.
The article on Illinois Indian language by Michael McCafferty that I referred to in “Mis-say it loud, mis-say it proud” appears in Protohistory at the Grand Village of the Kaskaskia: The Illinois Country on the Eve of Colony (Illinois State Archeological Survey, Studies in Archeology No. 10, Urbana, 2015), a collection of articles edited by […]
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Most depressing news of the week– so far
The Chicago Tribune, summarizing the day’s events in the General Assembly: A Senate committee advanced several measures that would overhaul the Illinois Constitution to eliminate the lieutenant governor’s office, replace the flat income tax rate with a graduated system based on income and overhaul how legislative districts are drawn. . . . All of those […]
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Mis-say it loud, mis-say it proud
The French misheard the Indians and the Americans misread the French. I was in the waiting room at the doctor’s office the other day. I’d already read that week’s OK! magazine at home, so instead I picked up a copy of “Illinois Voices: Observations on the Illinois-Miami Language,” by Michael McCafferty, an Algonquian and Uto-Aztecan […]
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Being all you can be
This week I dust off a Prejudices column from June 3, 1993, when same-sex marriage was illegal in Illinois and many Springfieldians still believed that same-sex love should be too. Tom Chiola, by the way, went on to serve as a judge of the Illinois Circuit Court of Cook County from 1994 to 2009; he […]
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Ghost houses
When the National Park Service in 1971 took over the blocks of Eighth and Jackson streets around the Lincoln home, it ruthlessly cleared them of any structures that had not been standing when the Lincolns lived there. The resulting grassy lots surrounded by wood fencing look like pastures or paddocks that suggest a country village more than […]
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More jet-age wonders
Space limitations kept me from discussing all of Springfield’s International Style buildings in my recent column on jet-age architecture. You’d think that the basic building model for the state fair and similar expositions is the barn, and so it is at the state fairgrounds, but one of the barns at the Illinois State Fairgrounds is […]
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If you don’t market it, will they come?
Photo by Alan Solomon/Tribune News Service You wouldn’t think that a town that boasts the burial place and the only adult home of a man famed around the world as not only America’s greatest president but America’s greatest citizen, a town furthermore that is just down the road from the reconstructed village where that man […]
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Jet-set architecture? In Springfield?
The State House Inn, designed by Henry L. Newhouse II, was the most stylish hotel in Springfield when it was built. After a 2003 reincarnation, it retains the title today. PHOTO COurTESY SANGAMON VALLEY COLlECTION AT LINCOLN LIBRARY Much in the way that human corpses become food for the worms, dead eras become food for […]
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Men in uniform
In “Off the rack” I chided the governor for his too-casual choices of attire while on the job. I concede that my standards in such matters were shaped by my first tow governors, William Stratton and Otto Kerner. Stratton was a bit of a dandy, Kerner went dignified. Kerner was named Best Dressed in his […]
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Vainglory
ILLUSTRATION BY RICK NEASE/TNS Some 30 years ago I was moved by the mindless boasting of the Republican blowhard in the White House to write this column, which appeared in the Prejudices series on Aug. 8, 1985. The presidential field at the moment offers us several others of the type, so I thought my […]
Posted inOpinion
Eggheads, again
This week I take up the governor’s choices in clothes, but I can find no fault with his grooming. I haven’t always been able to say that about Illinois’s senior politicians. In a 1990 column titled Eggheads, I examined – not a bit more closely than I had to – the topic of the comb-over […]
