[Blolover11]

Illinois is just as hostile towards business as it's adopted son, Barack Hussein Obama.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/busine...,6322503.story

CME Group calls tax situation 'untenable;' says it may exit state

Reuters

10:53 a.m. CDT, July 28, 2011

CME Group Inc. is evaluating whether to move some operations to other states from Chicago to reduce its taxes, but it has not decided on an exact timeline, CEO Craig Donohue said Thursday.

"Our tax situation is untenable," Donohue told Reuters, noting that CME is taxed more heavily than any of its global competitors. The company is talking with at least three states -- Texas, Florida and Tennessee -- about relocating some of its business to take advantage of lower tax rates there, Donohue said.

Texas CME has been based in Chicago since the founding of its oldest market, the Chicago Board of Trade, in 1848.

CME has no specific time frame for moving, Donohue said, and does not plan to shut its Chicago-based trading floor. But he said the possibility of moving other operations is real.

"I don't think CME group is different from other companies" that relocate to more "hospitable" business environments, he said.

[anconueys]

ChicagoNow: http://www.chicagonow.com/the-lowe-d...who-tell-them/

In January, in the waning days of the 96th General Assembly, Democratic legislators in Illinois passed a massive tax increase: from 3% to 5% for the personal income tax and from 4.8% to 7% for corporate income taxes.

Predictably, those against any and all tax hikes cried "businesses will leave Illinois" and screamed about how the state was creating a more hostile environment for business. However, any responsible metric showed that in order to eliminate the structural deficit, Illinois needed lots more revenue. An income tax increase was the easiest way to capture that needed revenue. The state didn't eliminate its billions in past due bills, but it put a big dent in the projected future deficits.

Still, the corporate shills cried and whined, with the latest threatening a move being the parent of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. This came after the CME group said in January it was not looking to move outside Illinois.

Today, the Chicago Tribune reports that the "top 50 publicly traded corporations [based in Illinois] paid less than 2 percent of their earnings in income taxes to states and municipalities across the country, with some paying nothing at all or receiving refunds." This led a professor at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management to tell the Tribune that for "multistate, multinational corporations, I don't think the state corporate income tax in Illinois … could be a deciding factor" in whether or not to relocate. In other words, when the big corporate kahunas yelp about taxes, they're just "posturing." Also consider that the Tribune report notes that two-thirds of corporations in Illinois aren't required to pay an income tax.