The editors of the Chicago Tribune via Yahoo urge corporate leaders to intercede with the mayor to negotiate a more sensible budget for the city:

What counts as “savings and efficiencies” in Mayor Brandon Johnson’s government?

In the 2026 budget the mayor presented last week, the two biggest items in that category were a $118 million reduction in how much the city planned to contribute to its woefully underfunded pension plans and a cap on how much overtime the Chicago Police Department could accrue.

That’s akin to an individual or household saying they’re tightening their belts by paying the minimum on their credit cards.

After explaining why we can’t expect any relief from the City Council, they continue:

So business community, if you are reading us, this is a dire moment.

Deals and investments that have been in the works in parts of the city still attractive to business are teetering, we hear. “Capital is fleeing,” one alderman tells us.

It’s a time now for high-profile corporate leaders to make clear to the mayor and council members what the stakes are. That could well mean that some household names threaten to close Chicago offices or reduce their city workforces. If that’s something these corporate leaders are contemplating behind closed doors — and we’ve little doubt it is — now’s the time to make those plans public.

The mayor has made it quite clear that he sees businesses as cows to be milked or slaughtered to feed the ravening maw of city services. There’s scarcely a sign of cutting expenses in the budget and a host of new pet projects.

I think they’re pleading in vain. Business leaders have an option they’re more likely to take than playing hardball with City Hall: get out of Dodge.

My question remains as it has been for nearly two years. What did people expect? The Chicago Teachers Union “brung” Brandon Johnson. He’s maintained what little popularity he retains by funneling more money to public employee union members. The solutions the editors envision, economic and population growth, play hardly any role in the mayor’s thinking.

This post is the first in a series considering costs in healthcare. I plan to reflect on the roles that insurance companies, Medicare, healthcare providers, and any other factor that comes to mind play. This first post in the series will be about the role of healthcare insurance companies in increasing the cost of healthcare. All of my figures are drawn from the National Association of Insurance Commissioners.

To my eye the remarkable thing about the insurance component of healthcare costs is how consistent they’ve been since 2017. That’s true whether you’re looking at healthcare insurance company profit margins (net income divided by net earned premium):

or as a percentage of total healthcare spending:

Profit margins soared during the reduction in utilization that took place but they have averaged around 3%. As a percentage of GDP insurance costs have varied from 6.4% to 6.9%. That’s so consistent my conclusion is that they are artifacts.

My tentative conclusion from that is that healthcare insurance costs are not driving cost increases; they’re following them.

Please don’t construe this as support for healthcare insurance companies. I don’t think that healthcare insurance should exist, at least not in its present form. Too many things presently covered are not insurable risks.

The story of the day is the “No Kings” rallies going on around the country. Chicago has been the site of one of the largest. It probably won’t be as large today because of the rain.

I don’t object to them so long as they remain non-violent but I don’t see much point to them, either. I don’t believe in kings (probably less than most Americans since I hale from a particularly Anglophobe part of the country). I don’t even watch Downton Abbey. I do believe in democracy (probably more than most Americans since I hale from a particularly populist part of the country).

But I don’t think they do much good or mean much, either. That may be colored by my living in Chicago, a remarkably oligarchic even hereditary oligarchic place. Here we are governed by lawless oligarchs and have been for most of the last century. Oh, yes, we have elections. Those are mostly pro forma.

Update

I want to agree with something that Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy has been quoted as saying at the DC “No Kings” rally:

We are not on the verge of an authoritarian takeover; we are in the midst of an authoritarian takeover.

My recommendation would be to vote against every incumbent politician.

On Friday night my wife and I attended a performance of Cherubini’s opera, Medea, at Lyric Opera, the first of our 2025-2026 season.

Medea premiered in 1797. Technically, it is an opéra comique meaning that as written it combines spoken dialogue with sung portions although the work is sometimes performed with recitatives composed later rather than spoken dialogue. There is nothing comic about it; it’s about as seria as you can get. In the final act Medea emerges from the temple covered in the blood of her children whom she has just murdered (pictured above). Take that, Jason.

It is a very difficult opera especially for the title character, Medea, who is onstage singing for all but the first 20 minutes. Because of that difficulty, the grim story, and the lack of recognizable melodies it is rarely performed. To the best of my ability to discover it has not been performed at all in Italy this year (operas by Italian composers are, reasonably enough, performed more frequently there) although it will be performed at La Scala later this year. It has been performed by a couple of companies in France this year in the original French language version.

To the extent that you can say the opera is “popular” it was popularized in the last century by Maria Callas who performed it many times. It has become sort of a Great White Whale for soprani.

This production is the first time the opera has been staged by Lyric Opera ever. I have never seen it before despite having been an opera buff for more than 50 years. Our soprano was the veteran Berwyn-native Radvanovsky who gave a bravura performance. The opera throughout was outstanding in singing and acting.

Sadly, Chicago is a Verdi-Puccini potboiler town so it did not have the audiences that such an excellent production deserved.

The staging and sets were particularly notable. The most significant feature was a large reflective surface upstage that reflected everything that happened downstage. Clouds, fire, etc. were also projected on the surface at times. I’m still trying to figure out how they accomplished that. I presume there were some downstage projectors.

This level of technical excellence and virtuosity bodes well for this year’s Lyric season.

It has received excellent reviews all-around.

Chris Jones at the Tribune:

In the Euripides play that bears her name, Medea shows up at the start, wailing that her life has no purpose in the face of her mistreatment by Jason, after making one sacrifice after another, and she comes with a chorus of nervous sycophants. But the 1797 opera by Luigi Cherubini, which has a libretto by François-Benoît Hoffman and is also derived from the Pierre Corneille dramatic adaptation, events begin with Glauce, the younger, naturally, and better-connected woman whom Jason has chosen in his freeze-out of his first partner.

In director David McVicar’s unnerving production, now at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, Elena Villalón is seen at a bouffant, rococo nuptial, her guests in celebrity Franco-Italinate attire but with ominous, glowing red eyes. She sings with fragility of her joy with Giasone (Matthew Polenzani), a happiness she worries will be short-lived. Soon, the doors of a vault-like apparatus close, Glauce and her crew are entombed and Sondra Radvanovsky’s Medea crawls
into view, as if from the gutter.

But Radvanovsky’s Medea is no snipe. She is a roaring force from the underworld, existing vocally, as Medea must, at the intersection of pain, pleading and panic at the strength and thus the potential consequences of her own emotions. For one who feels such agony at betrayal must feel the dangerous power of love herself.

What a performance from Radvanovsky!

Kyle MacMillan at the Sun-Times:

Riveting, all-out, all-encompassing.

That’s the kind of towering performance Sondra Radvanovsky delivers in Lyric Opera of Chicago’s first-ever production of “Medea,” adding a memorable chapter to an already distinguished career and opening the company’s 2025-26 with a thunderclap.

Lawrence A. Johnson at Chicago Classical Review:

Lyric Opera has so often been content to coast on mediocrity (and worse) in recent years, that it felt almost foreign Saturday night to have two genuine stars in the opera’s major roles for this important company premiere.

Sondra Radvanovsky has sung the role of Medea to acclaim at the Met and elsewhere. The celebrated soprano brought the requisite vocal power as well as scary dramatic intensity to the role of the title sorceress who is abandoned by her husband Jason (Giasone) and vows to wreak havoc on all.

With her bedraggled hair, Radvanovsky’s Medea was often a pitiable figure in the first two acts, crawling on the ground in pleading supplication for Giasone to return to her. She sang with tenderness in her Act I duet with Jason and retrospective moments recalling their past happy times. Yet when Medea goes full sorceress, the soprano brought jarring intensity to her vows of vengeance.

The role of Medea is one of the great voice-shredders, yet Radvanovsky rose to the daunting challenge of the final act, which is essentially an unbroken 35-minute mad scene. The soprano tackled all the formidable challenges, flinging out the leaping top notes, handling the bursts of rapid vocalism and making Medea’s frenzied indecision about whether to not to murder her children to get revenge on Giasone nerve-wracking and harrowing. A memorable, genuinely great performance by a singer at the peak of her career.

It is an excellent review overall, one with which I concur. I recommend Mr. Johnson’s analysis of the issues in the work.

Everyone should be glad that I’m not a Supreme Court Justice. Were I my opinion would be to deny the Trump Administration’s request to deploy the National Guard to protect the Broadview facility but accompany that with an order to the governor of Illinois to protect the facility, government property, and the facility’s occupants.

That’s within the courts powers-in-equity. It’s a decision that would make no one happy.

This statement at Matt Yglesias’s Slow Boring Substack made me sit up and take notice:

Sasha Gusev: Political films seem to mostly fall into two tracks: the ideologically pure protagonist is corrupted by politics or always was (The Candidate, The Ides of March, A Face in the Crowd, Primary Colors, Wag The Dog, In The Loop), or the ideologically pure protagonist stands on his principles and wins (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The American President).

I could only wonder whether Sasha Gusev had ever seen Frank Capra’s 1939 movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington? Yes, Jefferson Smith is “ideologically pure”. He’s preternaturally ideologically pure. That’s in stark contrast with Claude Raines’s Senator Paine. That character and portrayal strike me as quite accurate (and typical).

Does Jeff Smith “win”? He has maintained his principles but he has not won. He is physically and emotionally a wreck. He is disillusioned at the real nature of politics. There is no bright future ahead for him. It’s hard to see what’s ahead for him. He certainly doesn’t get the girl and ride off into the sunset.

In MSGTW it is the people who have won.

Similarly, what happens at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life? The sense in which George Bailey “wins” is that he is no longer suicidal and has newfound appreciation of his family. His business is still a wreck and he has all the other problems he had at the start of the picture. The real winners are the people of Bedford Falls.

That’s actually pretty typical of Capra pictures. It’s one of the things that sets them apart. Consider Meet John Doe or Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. It Happened One Night is one of the rare cases of a Capra picture in which the “hero gets the girl” but even there I don’t think that’s actually what happened. I think that Clark Gable’s anti-hero “gets the girl” and she’s a spoiled rich girl who isn’t that much of a prize. Maybe her experiences have changed her but probably not.

Let’s not build the arch that President Trump has proposed for the U. S. 250th birthday.

Perhaps it’s irony, perhaps coincidence, or perhaps we’re both interpreting the tom-toms the same way but Ruy Teixeira’s latest post calls out Democrats for lacking what George H. W. Bush once called “the vision thing”. Here’s a snippet:

Cast your mind back to the halcyon days when American politics revolved around George H.W. Bush and his delightful locutions. A quintessential Bushism was when he referred to his (hard-to-define) overarching goal as the “the vision thing.” He wasn’t sure what it was and neither was anyone else.

Today’s Democrats have a similar problem. Nobody really knows what they stand for besides being really, really against Trump. That makes it hard to have a recognizable vision for the country since it’s a purely negative politics. What kind of society are Democrats aiming for and how would ordinary people find their place in it?

I don’t think there’s a lack of vision among Democrats. I think there’s a multitude of them.

Elected officials of both parties imagine an America that provides them with permanent sinecures garnished with cushy pensions when they retire while they devote their attentions to enriching themselves through “pay to play” and getting donations for their re-election campaigns.

The progressives at whom Mr. Teixeira levels his fire are vanguardists. They imagine themselves leading the ignorant masses to some ever-receding destination but there are far fewer willing followers than I believe they fancy.

The post is full of graphs of the results of polling data which illustrate a common conclusion: Americans see the visions of that latter group pretty clearly and recognize that they have little appeal to them. Here’s one of the graphs which I think makes the point pretty well:

Healthcare is the one interest that average folks and Democrats have in common but there’s a rub, quoting Nate Cohn:

Health care hasn’t been front and center for years. In the final New York Times/Siena poll of the 2024 campaign, less than one percent of voters said health care was the most important issue to their vote [open-ended question]…Ever since Mr. Trump came down the escalator, the basic political conflict between the two parties has changed to something very different than the one that put health care at the fore…

[H]ealth care is unlikely to return to the center of American politics—not anytime soon.

Furthermore, as I have noted increasing subsidies in the absence of increasing supply has the unfortunate effect of raising prices which in turn impels more subsidies. Democrats need to get their minds around that issue.

I’ve just created my first LLM AI agent.