Live from Music Row, Wednesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio for another edition of Crom’s Crommentary.

CROM CARMICHAEL:

Michael, there there were two articles recently in The Wall Street Journal, one about Illinois and the other is about California. And these are both deep blue states with big cities run by deep blue mayors.

And the city of Chicago, for example, just in the last, I think, 12-18 months, has lost three major corporations. Citadel, Boeing, and Caterpillar have moved out of the city of Chicago, and Allstate, which had a giant campus, sold its giant campus and shrunk itself down to a relatively small building.

Allstate had 5,400 Chicago area employees, and 83 percent have chosen to work remotely. Well, if you work remotely, you can work anywhere you want to, so you don’t even need to stay in Illinois. There’s a professor named David Collis, a professor at Harvard Business School and a so-called expert on corporate strategy, and he says this is no big deal for Illinois.

No big deal? Corporate headquarters have been becoming less important for the last 20 years. Okay, well, that may be, but how about this, Professor Collins? Last month, a Journal editorial noted that U.S. Census data showed that Illinois lost 141,000 residents to other states.

So if your state is shrinking, if people are fleeing from your state, is that a big deal? And if it’s not a big deal, at what point does it become a big deal? And these are good questions to ask. It’s kind of like one of the great questions to ask somebody.

Michael, if you disagree on something, say, look, I know exactly why I think the way I do. I think I understand the way that you think. Is there any information that I could provide to you that would cause you to change your mind? Because I can answer that for myself.

And it really makes it merely focuses the conversation on the differences and whether or not you can resolve them. And then the second one is the headline: California Faces $22.5 Billion Deficit, and Gavin Newsom thinks that this is the freest state in the country.

Now, I guess it means you’re free to do drugs, you’re free to rob stores, and you’re free to do street walking, and prostitution. These are all things in California that you’re free to do. But what you’re not free to do is not pay a whole lot in taxes property taxes, and you can’t avoid the regulators of California.

So Gavin Newsom is picking a particularly difficult time to try to represent what a great governor he is if he does run for president.

Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:

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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Reporwith Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.