John McCarron

I've written more than a hundred of these columns over the last two years, but rarely have I offered readers advice about investments. And I don't plan to start now....

Where's my share of the Chicago riverboats? Surely I'm owed a piece of the action. How about 2 percent off the top? OK, I'll settle for 1 percent. But no...

For a long time I've wondered what it would be like to sell poppies at the Rock. So last Thursday, Poppy Day in America, I put on my uncool American...

Last week, a lot of influential people in Chicago were predicting a train wreck. Instead, they got a helicopter crash. Which is just as well, because nobody was killed. Almost...

Squish. Droop. Flop. You can almost hear the sound of bending as Bill Clinton's spine goes soft. The president was surprised and disappointed that his economic stimulus package was ambushed...

My period of voluntary national service wasn't all that voluntary. Oh, I stepped up and joined the Navy all right. But it was during the late '60s. There was a...

"Taxes," Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once wrote, "are what we pay for a civilized society." Too bad the great jurist didn't offer an opinion as to how much is too...

It's an interesting topic, this downsizing of corporate America. I've written a column or two about it. Lots of writers have. The latest wrinkle is the "jobless recovery." Many of...

I have seen the future, and it doesn't look all that bad. Maybe my judgment has been warped by a week of Hawaii's gentle trade winds, white sand beaches and...

"Where's mine?" Wags around City Hall say it ought to be Chicago's motto. It would fit nicely on the city seal: "ubi est meum?" instead of "urbs in horto." Ah,...