PJ Star: State tax freeze proposal is having undesired effect
Does anyone remember one of the central themes of the Illinois governor’s race last year?
We were told during campaign commercials and stump speeches that taxes were too high, the burden on Illinoisans too crushing. Residents were fleeing the state, businesses were atrophying or decamping for lower-cost pastures, startups were stymied.
Gov. Bruce Rauner has now talked up a tax freeze, and a two-year version of it has been advanced by the state Senate.
Pantagraph: US Steel temporarily idling Granite City works
U.S. Steel will temporarily idle its Granite City Works steelmaking and finishing operations, putting about 2,000 workers off the job indefinitely.
The steelmaker did not indicate how long the shutdown would last in a two-paragraph announcement Monday afternoon.
The company says the shutdown is the result of market conditions including fluctuating oil prices, reduced rig counts, imports and depressed steel prices. Most steel produced at the southern Illinois mill is shipped to a Texas plant that turns it into pipe for the oil and gas industry.
McHenry Times: Algonquin-Lake in the Hills Fire pension debt has quadrupled since 2005
The Algonquin-Lake in the Hills Fire Protection District Pension Fund’s unfunded liability has jumped 379 percent over the past 10 years, according to a report by the Illinois Department of Insurance (DOI).
The 2015 Biennial Report summarizes the financial health of all state and municipal pension funds. It reports that property taxpayers in the two suburbs had $5.375 million in unfunded liability at the end of its 2014 fiscal year, up from $1.12 million at the end of 2005.
“There’s only two ways to fix this: bring more money into them by increasing taxes and/or cut benefits,” Sheila Weinberg, founder and CEO of Truth in Accounting, told the McHenry Times. “And neither of those is likely.”
Bond Buyer: Another Black Mark For Chicago Schools Credit
The credit picture for the already junk-rated Chicago Public Schools has become even bleaker.
Standard & Poor’s put the Chicago Board of Education’s BB rating on CreditWatch with negative implications late Friday.
“The CreditWatch action is based on our view of the board’s lack of progress in meeting the assumptions in its fiscal 2016 budget for Chicago Public Schools,” said Standard & Poor’s analyst Jennifer Boyd.
Sun-Times: Chicago is home to worst traffic bottleneck in U.S.: study
Chicago came in tops in the nation again Monday — but not for anything its residents want to brag about.
A new study identified a 12-mile stretch of mostly the Kennedy Expressway — from Nagle through the Edens Junction past the Jane Byrne Interchange to Roosevelt Road — as the worst bottleneck in the nation.
And that’s worst not only in hours of delay — estimated at 16.9 million over a year of weekdays in 2014— but in terms of the length of the clog. The delays equate to $418 million in lost time, the study found.
Madison Record: Majority of Illinois Independents in favor of government spending cuts, poll says
As Illinois lawmakers strive to solve the state budget impasse, Illinoisans have spoken out loud and clear. In a recent poll released by Americans for Prosperity Illinois, 62 percent of Independents are in favor of spending cuts, while a mere 9 percent support tax hikes.
The poll shows that regardless of party affiliation, a large majority of voters expressed their approval of additional spending cuts in government as the most appropriate solution to the state’s current budget crisis. Voters were not in favor of higher taxes or increased borrowing.
In a press release, Americans for Prosperity said that it would continue to urge lawmakers to balance the state budget by employing conservative spending measures, rather than tax hikes that will crush the job market.
Herald & Review: Reducing government is serious business
Illinois taxpayers could save significant dollars by reducing the number of units of government.
However, Democrats and labor unions need to take the effort seriously first.
Twice pranksters interrupted a task force meeting last week on the subject. At one point, during a vote on whether to make collective bargaining permissible instead of mandatory the song, “Solidarity Forever,” was played over a conference call phone. During a discussion about eliminating a state mandate concerning staffing of fire departments, one of the pranksters played a fire siren on the conference call.
How cute. What’s next? Wedgies? Tee-peeing the governor’s mansion?
WCIA: Illinois taxpayers pay more than most for their cell phones
Picking up and making calls from your cell phone in Illinois will cost you more than most other states.
A new report by the Tax Foundation shows the state has the fourth highest tax rate on wireless phones in the United States. New York, Nebraska, and Washington are the three states with higher rates than the Land of Lincoln.
Scott Mackey works for the wireless industry and was an author of the report. He said phones bills are tapped by multiple sources in each state.
Telegraph Herald: Illinois' time bomb growing, ticking louder
In 1994, Illinois Gov. Jim Edgar spearheaded a bipartisan pension bill he claimed would solve the state’s then-$15 billion pension deficit.
“We had a time bomb in our retirement system that was going to go off in the first part of the 21st century,” Edgar told The State Journal Register at the time. “This legislation defuses that time bomb.”
Today, Illinois’ pension debt totals more than $100 billion. That’s because Edgar’s plan didn’t structurally reform pensions. Instead, it simply pushed the state’s pension obligations far off into the future — through 2045 — in the hope that future legislatures would deal with them.