September 2, 2014

QUOTE OF THE DAY

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Washtingon Times: Generous teacher pensions continue as Illinois’ financial crisis worsens

If the Illinois Teachers Retirement S If the Illinois Teachers Retirement Service (TRS) had to pay out all of its pensions today, it could only afford to give its members 40 cents on the dollar.

Yet the number of six-figure pensions TRS has been doling out has increased 24 percent this year compared to last, with about 6,000 retired educators collecting more than $100,000 annually, according to records obtained by Open the Books, an online aggregator of local spending that tracks educator salaries, pensions and vendor spending.

The group’s Labor Day report found more than 100,000 retired Illinois educators had been paid back what they invested into the system just 20 months after leaving work, a financial burden linked to union collective bargaining, which can cost taxpayers $2 million or more per teacher over the course of retirement.

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NY Times: Public Pension Funds Stay Mum on Corporate Expats

In the outcry about the recent merger mania to take advantage of the tax avoidance transactions known as inversions, certain key players have been notably silent: public pension funds.

Many of the nation’s largest public pension funds — managing trillions of dollars on behalf of police and fire departments, teachers and others — have major stakes in American companies that are seeking to renounce their corporate citizenship in order to lower their tax bill.

While politicians have criticized these types of deals — President Obama has called them “wrong” and he is examining ways to end the practice — public pension funds don’t appear to be using their influence as major shareholders to encourage corporations to stay put.

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TIME: Fast Food Workers Plan Another Strike in 150 Cities

Fast food workers around the country are planning another set of one-day walkouts this Thursday, according to Fast Food Forward, an organizing group for the protests. The strikes will take place in 150 cities at restaurants such as McDonald’s, Wendy’s and KFC. Fast-food workers have spent almost two years using such walkouts as part of an ongoing campaign to demand pay of $15 an hour—what they call a living wage—and the right to unionize. The average hourly wage for restaurant workers was $8.74 as of May 2013, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The efforts began with 200 fast-food workers in New York City in November 2012 and have since become a regular occurrence across the country every three or four months. In their attempts to reach their stated goals, the workers’ efforts have so far yielded modest results. In May Daisha Mims, a McDonadl’s employee who has participated in walkouts, told TIME she’d received 35 cents in raises since the strikes began. “I still feel as though I need a second job,” she said at the time. Organizers pointed to similarly sized gains for a small number of individuals across the country.

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Daily Herald: Illinois to spend another $102M on high-speed rail

The state of Illinois will spent $102 million to build a bridge over the Kankakee River along with other improvements as part of high-speed rail upgrades between Chicago and St. Louis.

Gov. Pat Quinn announced the funding on Sunday. The bridge will be built near Wilmington. The money also will pay for other safety and capacity efforts between Joliet and Dwight and a second set of tracks between Mazonia and Elwood.

The Illinois Department of Transportation will oversee the work done by Union Pacific Railroad. The construction will take place in 2016 and 2017. The governor’s office says the project will create more than 900 construction jobs.

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USA Today: Who’s paying the new Obamacare tax? You

When Congress passed the Affordable Care Act, it required health insurers, hospitals, device makers and pharmaceutical companies to share in the cost because they would get a windfall of new, paying customers.

But with an $8 billion tax on insurers due Sept. 30 — the first time the new tax is being collected — the industry is getting help from an unlikely source: taxpayers.

States and the federal government will spend at least $700 million this year to pay the tax for their Medicaid health plans. The three dozen states that use Medicaid managed-care plans will give those insurers more money to cover the new expense. Many of those states — such as Florida, Louisiana and Tennessee — did not expand Medicaid as the law allows, and in the process turned down billions in new federal dollars.

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New York Times: Where Are the Hardest Places to Live in the U.S.?

Annie Lowrey writes in the Times Magazine this week about the troubles of Clay County, Ky., which by several measures is the hardest place in America to live.

The Upshot came to this conclusion by looking at six data points for each county in the United States: education (percentage of residents with at least a bachelor’s degree), median household income, unemployment rate, disability rate, life expectancy and obesity. We then averaged each county’s relative rank in these categories to create an overall ranking.

(We tried to include other factors, including income mobility and measures of environmental quality, but we were not able to find data sets covering all counties in the United States.)

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Fiscal Times: Post Office Paid $287K for Trucks It Can’t Find

The sum of $287,000 may seem like a tiny drop in the bucket when it comes to Washington’s astronomical spending totals.

But at a time when the United States Postal Service has been bleeding literally billions of dollars, spending even that amount on a fleet of vehicles it now cannot locate, and never actually could, is worth a bit of a pause.

A report in Government Executive this morning notes that while USPS spends about $39 million a year to rent 10,000 trailers—the cargo bodies of its trucks—it also leased 35 trailers in fiscal years 2011 and 2012 to a distribution center in New Jersey.

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Crain’s Chicago: Amid re-election fight, Quinn pushes through a tax on business

Despite protests from business and the bill’s own sponsors, Gov. Pat Quinn recently signed an obscure change in state insurance law, quietly taking away a distinct tax advantage the state offered for large companies headquartered in Illinois.

Drafted by the Department of Insurance, the bill’s innocuous technical language apparently masked its real impact—an estimated tax hike of at least $100 million a year, according to a business group—until after the House and Senate passed it unanimously.

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Chicago Tribune: Quinn takes on minimum wage challenge

Gov. Pat Quinn said Sunday he had begun a weeklong attempt to spend no more than $79 on food and other expenses, part of an effort to build support for a minimum wage referendum that will be on the ballot in November, when voters will also choose between the incumbent Democrat and his Republican challenger.

The $79 budget, which Quinn announced at a South Side church, is an estimate that reflects what a minimum wage worker in Illinois can spend each week on food and recreation after covering the costs of housing, transportation and taxes, according to Quinn’s re-election campaign.

“It’s very important, I think, for all of us who are in government to understand what everyday people who earn a living and are working hard on the minimum wage, what they have to contend with,” Quinn told reporters outside the Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church in the Fuller Park neighborhood, where he made the announcement.

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New York Times: Imagining Successful Schools

What should teacher accountability look like?

We know what the current system of accountability looks like, and it’s not pretty. Ever since the passage of No Child Left Behind 12 years ago, teachers have been judged, far too simplistically, based on standardized tests given to their students — tests, as Marc S. Tucker points out in a new report, Fixing Our National Accountability System, that are used to decide which teachers should get to keep their jobs and which should be fired. This system has infuriated and shamed teachers, and is a lot of the reason that teacher turnover is so high, causing even many of the best teachers to abandon the ranks.

All of which might be worth it if this form of accountability truly meant that public school students were getting a better education. But, writes Tucker, “There is no evidence that it is contributing anything to improved student performance.” Meanwhile, he adds, test-based accountability is “doing untold damage to the profession of teaching.”

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CARTOON OF THE DAY

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