Chicago Tribune: College of DuPage: 'Taxpayers do not count. Insiders do.'
Trustees at the College of DuPage moved last week to catapult President Robert Breuder a few years before his contract expires. But don’t feel bad for him. He will float pleasantly to Earth with a golden parachute worth more than $750,000 in severance.
No, feel bad for yourself, especially if you pay taxes to the College of DuPage.
The public knows the details of Breuder’s exit deal only because the Tribune obtained a copy of it. The trustees didn’t publicly debate the terms. They didn’t air why they want Breuder to leave, or why they think they had to fork over so much money to accomplish the trick. It was all hush-hush.
The Atlantic: Why Can't Unions Keep Up With the Economy?
Last year may have been a banner year for job creation in U.S., but it was not a banner year for unions. The percentage of union members among workers nationwide dropped to a new low of 11.1 percent in 2014, extending a decades-long decline for the labor movement.
For union supporters, the new data released Friday by the Labor Department tells a familiar but dispiriting story that illuminates the national debate over slow wage growth and income inequality. A generational shift in the labor market that eliminated U.S. jobs in union-dominated industries has been exacerbated in recent years by assaults on public-sector unions in Republican-led states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Indiana.
Yes, the U.S. created some 3 million jobs in 2014—the most since 1999—but too few of them paid well, and those that already had jobs saw little increase in their salaries. “That’s a fundamental consequence of the inability of workers, through collective bargaining, to negotiate for higher wages as the economy improves,” Larry Mishel, president of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, said in an interview Friday. Or, as Jonathan Schmitt of the Center for Economic and Policy Research told The Wall Street Journal: “The overall workforce is growing faster than the union workforce.”
Rock River Times: Illinois home prices climb 3.7 percent in December
Illinois home prices continued to recover with median prices showing year-over-year gains every month in 2014. Home sales, while modestly lower than 2013, pointed toward a stabilizing market, according to the Illinois Association of Realtors.
Statewide home sales (including single-family homes and condominiums) in December 2014 totaled 11,397 homes sold, down 0.9 percent from 11,499 in December 2013. Year-end 2014 home sales totaled 146,659, down 4.7 percent from 153,937 in 2013.
The statewide median price in December was $154,000, up 3.7 percent from December 2013 when the median price was $148,500. The median is a typical market price where half the homes sold for more and half sold for less. The year-end 2014 median price reached $160,000, up 6.7 percent from $150,000 in 2013.
Bloomberg View: Uncle Sam Is Coming After Your Savings
Earlier in the week, I discussed the Obama administration’s proposal to tax earnings on so-called 529 college savings plans, part of a package of tax hikes that will pay for new programs such as his proposal to make the first two years of community college free. This has been touted as a plan to hike taxes on the rich to help the middle class, but in fact it’s more of a plan to redistribute money from the upper middle class to the lower middle class.
As I noted then, this proposal is not going anywhere, not just because Republican congressmen will block it, but because it would be very unpopular with affluent blue-state voters who currently vote for Democrats. About the only people I saw defending this particular idea were blue-state singles who haven’t yet confronted the monstrous expense of shepherding their progeny into the new mandarin class to which they belong.
Everyone else seems to be somewhere between confused and aghast. One comment in particular struck me, as I saw it several times on social media and in writings: “How would you feel if they did this to Roth IRAs?”
The Atlantic: The Uber Economy
In the last few years, Uber has gone through a life cycle that once took successful companies decades to complete—from start-up to upstart, from pushy disruptor to pushy behemoth, from iPhone button to cultural icon. Uber’s executives don’t like to associate themselves with the “sharing economy,” the smattering of firms that allow average Joes to sell access to their fallow goods and services (rent my empty home on Airbnb, buy my open 3 p.m. hour on TaskRabbit). The company’s ambitions, it says, are grander. But for now, the vast majority of drivers are behind the wheel of their own car. “Sharing” is, to be quite literal, the majority business of Uber.
This puts Uber squarely in the crosshairs of a debate about what exactly this peer-to-peer economy means for the future of the economy. (Like all discussions that include the term “future of the economy,” this can amount to little more than rounding up some very recent developments and projecting forward 10 years with jaunty confidence.) Are these new companies creating value from nothing, or destroying the value of the formal economy? Are they inventing new, flexible ways for underemployed Americans to work, or are they contributing to the destruction of full-time jobs?
The typical Uber driver is a college-educated man, married with kids, who is supplementing a full- or part-time job with about 15 hours of driving a week, logging 20 to 30 trips, and earning an extra $300 to $400 a week (before factoring in the cost of gas and upkeep). That’s according to a new paper by Alan Krueger, the eminent Princeton economist who served as chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, working with Uber’s head of policy research, Jonathan Hall. Krueger and Hall based their research on both Uber’s data and an online survey of 600 Uber drivers in 20 markets, including New York, Washington, and San Francisco.
Chicago Tribune: For $1, residents buy a piece of Chicago
Asiaha Butler recently got quite a deal. Chicago got the best of the bargain, though.
Butler bought a large corner lot across from her two-flat in the struggling Chicago neighborhood of Englewood. The selling price: $1. She is among hundreds of local residents who are taking advantage of a program to sell city-owned vacant lots in blighted areas for a buck apiece.
Tribune reporter Mary Ellen Podmolik recently chronicled how it works.
The Southern: Idea to tax college savings plans draws fire
Critics say President Barack Obama’s plan to use new tax dollars to help fund community college tuition for millions of students would penalize parents who have saved for their own children’s educations.
The president’s plan calls for funding his community college initiative by ending a tax break for 529 college savings plans.
The 529 plans are designed for and used by “middle-income families that can’t afford pay-as-you-go, but who aren’t eligible for need-based aid, ” said Betty Lochner, chairwoman of the College Savings Plan Network.
State Journal Register: Settle in for a dramatic first act at the Illinois Capitol
It’s showtime again in Springfield, and the supporting cast is the same as last year — more than 100 Democrats who maintain veto-proof majorities in the House and Senate.
But there’s a new star, Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner, who enters stage right with a fresh script that promises to replace “business as usual” with fiscal and ethical reform.
Act 1 will focus primarily on the state’s financial crisis — a multi-billion-dollar budget shortfall, stacks of unpaid bills, a broken tax system and an unresolved pension crisis.