by Kate Piercy From S.T. Karnick at The American Culture: In case you missed it, LA Times reporters Jason Felch, Jason Song and Doug Smith used California’s public records law to obtain seven years of math and English test scores from the Los Angeles Unified School District. They asked Richard Buddin, a well-respected analyst at the RAND Corporation,...
by Kate Piercy R. Eden Martin, president of the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago, offers some solutions to the critical pension problem facing Illinois in today’s Wall Street Journal. Martin concludes, “Public pension funds are in dire need of change, but state and local hopes for a federal bailout now stand in the way...
Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University constructed the diagram below using data from the Congressional Budget Office during the very early stages of the Great Recession and before the Obama presidency. It shows the increase in marginal tax rates required to fund entitlement spending for 2010, 2050 and 2082. The required increase...
by Amanda Griffin-Johnson At the end of July, the White House’s Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board claimed more than 750,000 jobs were funded by the economic stimulus package last quarter. This estimate was the highest total reported so far, and some saw this as “encouraging news.” But Veronique de Rugy, a senior research fellow at...
The Problem Illinois’s dire fiscal situation continues to worsen year after year, and to turn this bad situation around it’s important to evaluate existing programs to ensure they’re necessary and effective. One such program that needs evaluation is the Environment and Nature Training Institute for Conservation Education (ENTICE) workshops from the Illinois Department of Natural...
by Amanda Griffin-Johnson A clout hiring scandal in Chicago’s Department of Transportation (CDOT) has led to a five-day, unpaid suspension for an engineering technician and the resignation of a Deputy Commissioner. The Chicago Sun-Times reports: Jim Bolster was slapped with the five-day suspension “for assisting” his boss, former Deputy Commissioner Gilberto Quinones, in Quinones’ quest to...
by Kristin Nisbet* The Pacific Research Institute and director Nick Tucker created a film adaption of a book titled “Not as Good as You Think” by Lance Izumi, Vicki Murray and Rachel Chaney. This film of the same name questions the assumption that having a well manicured lawn and owning a house in the suburbs is key to gaining access to...
by Collin Hitt Congress approved another bailout yesterday. This one for state governments and local school districts. The feds will print $26 billion, ostensibly to forestall 161,000 teacher layoffs. Without getting into the details about the nationwide teacher hiring glut of the past ten years, the threat to fiscal federalism from this new ‘stimulus,’ or...
by Ashley Muchow Another great cartoon from Scott Stantis of the Chicago Tribune. Illinois’s State Sales Tax Holiday commenced August 6th and is set to last until August 15th. See our blog on the tax holiday and a bit more from the Tax Foundation on the political gimmick.
by Kristina Rasmussen Regular readers know that we’re no fans of the political propaganda signs that dot America’s debt-funded “stimulus” projects. With that in mind, a photo I came across on Facebook today tells the real story.
by Kristina Rasmussen Dennis Byrne’s column poses some interesting questions about the Illinois state pension system — namely, if it goes belly up, will taxpayers be on the hook for paying those benefits? A new analysis prepared for the Civic Committee by the Chicago law firm Sidley Austin says “no”: The opinion acknowledges that the constitution creates a...
by Kristina Rasmussen The House just voted on the ill-crafted state government/union boss bailout bill. The bill passed, and it looks headed to President Obama’s desk for his likely signature. Unions representing public employees and teachers may be cheering, but many taxpayers are jeering, and for good reason. They understand this measure will only increase the pressure...
by Amanda Griffin-Johnson A state audit of a Cook County jobs training program is raising concerns about some of the program’s expenditures. The Chicago Tribune reports: Among an audit’s 68 findings were questions about whether youths who were paid more than $1 million were even qualified to be in the program, why $31,000 in pension payments...
by Ashley Muchow What’s that? More bailouts? That’s right, I said it. More bailouts. Illinois’s own, Senator Dick Durbin, has confirmed his support of Senator Robert Casey’s (D-PA) brilliantly frivolous bill, ironically titled the Create Jobs and Save Benefits Act, to bailout approximately $165 billion of underfunded union pension funds. Believe it or not, our state government is...