QUOTE OF THE DAY
Chicago Tribune: If we raise minimum wage, why stop at $10 an hour?
When President Barack Obama and other Chicago Democrats talked about raising the minimum wage to $10 an hour, at first I didn’t believe them.
And cynical thoughts came to mind, like “class war” and “November elections” and “pandering for votes.”
But I’ve changed. I agree with the president and the Chicago Way boys. Now I think that raising the minimum wage to $10 an hour doesn’t go nearly far enough.
John Stossel: Spring Clean Government
Spring cleaning is a healthy tradition. If only politicians did it!
They don’t.
When Barack Obama ran for president, he promised to clean house, “I’m not a Democrat who believes that we can or should defend every government program just because it’s there. There are some that don’t work.”
Blue Sky Innovation: Mark Cuban invests $250,000 in Packback on ‘Shark Tank’
Mark Cuban agreed to invest $250,000 in Chicago-based Packback in exchange for 20 percent equity in the company on Friday night’s episode of ABC’s “Shark Tank.”
The Chicago-based company offers a pay-per-view way to read college textbooks. At a viewing party at 1871, guests stood and cheered as the Packback segment closed out the show where startup founders pitch their ideas to a panel of potential investors.
Kasey Gandham and Mike Shannon founded Packback in 2012 while undergraduates at Illinois State University.
Walter Williams: Is There Wage Stagnation?
Many economists, politicians and pundits assert that median wages have stagnated since the 1970s. That’s a call for government to do something about it. But before we look at the error in their assertion, let’s work through an example that might shed a bit of light on the issue.
Suppose that you paid me a straight $20 an hour in 2004. Ten years later, I’m still earning $20 an hour, but in addition, now I’m receiving job perks such as health insurance, an employer-matched 401(k) plan, paid holidays and vacation, etc. Would it be correct to say that my wages have stagnated and I’m no better off a decade later? I’m guessing that the average person would say, “No, Williams, your wages haven’t stagnated. You forgot to include your non-monetary wages.” My colleagues Donald Boudreaux and Liya Palagashvili discuss some of this in their recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, “The Myth of the Great Wages ‘Decoupling'” (http://tinyurl.com/oq7z4a3).
They start out saying: “Many pundits, politicians and economists claim that wages have fallen behind productivity gains over the last generation. … This story, though, is built on an illusion. There is no great decoupling of worker pay from productivity. Nor have workers’ incomes stagnated over the past four decades.” There are two routinely made mistakes when wages are compared over time. “First, the value of fringe benefits — such as health insurance and pension contributions — is often excluded from calculations of worker pay. Because fringe benefits today make up a larger share of the typical employee’s pay than they did 40 years ago (about 19 percent today compared with 10 percent back then), excluding them fosters the illusion that the workers’ slice of the (bigger) pie is shrinking.”
Forbes: Border War In The Midwest: Indiana And Illinois Fight For Growth
Last week, the Indiana state legislature passed further reductions in corporate business tax rates that, within eight years, will establish the Hoosier State as having the lowest business tax rate in the country. Indiana Governor Mike Pence has said that he plans to sign it into law. The bill will lower the corporate income tax rate each year through 2022, when the 4.9% rate will become the lowest corporate rate in the U.S. It also provides three options for local governments to lower the business personal property tax.
This is good news for Indiana, which is rapidly becoming a pro-growth model for states that are looking for ways to compete for employers, jobs, and tax revenues. Smart fiscal policies are improving the lives of workers across the state. Indiana now creates one out of every ten new jobs in America and actually rebates surplus funds to its taxpayers.
Unfortunately, this is bad news for Illinois, Indiana’s neighbor to the east. Illinois is wrestling with an unfunded pension liability of $187 billion, a recent ranking of last place in job creation with an anemic growth rate of 0.98, and the highest jobless rate in the Midwest. Even more troubling, Illinois’ paltry 11% increase in manufacturing jobs since 2009 has kept families who are struggling to make ends meet tied to unemployment lines. Compare this with Indiana manufacturing jobs’ recovery rates, which are close to 50%, and it is easy to see why the stakes are high for Illinois workers this election cycle.
Chicago Sun Times: CPS CEO recommends turnarounds for three schools
Chicago Public Schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett on Friday announced recommendations to turnaround three low-performing elementary schools — two on the West Side and one on the South Side.
If approved by the Board of Education in April, McNair Elementary School in Austin, Dvorak Technology Academy in North Lawndale and Gresham Elementary School in Auburn-Gresham will be managed by the Academy for Urban School Learning, which already runs 29 CPS schools and teacher training academies.
CPS on Friday confirmed 76 teachers and a total of 147 total employees will be affected by the turnaround, if approved. Teachers must re-apply for their positions. CPS earlier gave an inaccurate number of faculty, counting in the staff of two other schools.
Chicago Sun Times: Targeting millionaires, Madigan unwilling to reveal his own taxes
After proposing a 3-percent surcharge on Illinois’ millionaires, House Speaker Michael Madigan Friday rejected a request to release his own 2012 income-tax returns to shed a more clear public understanding of how he would fare under his own constitutional amendment.
“He doesn’t have any interest in doing that,” Madigan spokesman Steve Brown told the Chicago Sun-Times.
Illinois had 13,675 people in calendar year 2011 who reported net income of $1 million or more, but it’s not clear whether Madigan himself was one of those people.
CARTOON OF THE DAY
