A new study by the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., takes a state-by-state look at the value of the welfare benefits package. While no one in America receives welfare benefits from all 72 federal welfare benefits programs that provide direct cash or in-kind assistance, long-term welfare beneficiaries are more likely to receive benefits from multiple programs. Highlights...
New ACT scores reveal that Illinois schools are still struggling to prepare their students for life after graduation. Overall, only 25 percent of the state’s students were considered college-ready in all four subjects – the exact same percentage as last year and 1 percentage point below the national average. This is still too low, especially for a...
Divvy bike stations are expanding throughout Chicago, offering riders low membership costs and 24-hour rental fees. But this multimillion-dollar project is bringing in only a fraction of the money necessary to fund it. Last year, the city of Chicago announced a controversial $65 million contract with ALTA Bicycle Share to operate a 4,000 bicycle bike-share program in...
Not long after the Supreme Court announced earlier this year that it would hear McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, a case concerning election contribution limits, political commentators began to hype the alleged dangers of money in our political process. In recent weeks, with the Supreme Court scheduled to hear arguments in the case in October,...
Cash-strapped Chicago is about to get an injection of money from motorists. The city is installing its controversial speed cameras at four neighborhood parks on Monday, and has plans for eight additional locations in the next few months. The city announced the results from a test of the new technology that showed surprising results. During a December trial,...
Opponents of education innovation should be worried. The U.S. Department of Education just released one of the largest studies on blended learning ever conducted, and the results are amazing. Students who used a new blended learning program learned nearly twice as much math as they normally would in a year. The two-year study – the largest conducted...
When Chicago Public Schools, or CPS, unveiled its list of 50 schools to be closed this past summer, Chicago Teachers Union, or CTU, President Karen Lewis acted as if the union she leads was a victim of the city’s $1 billion deficit — not a willing accomplice in its creation. Lewis will probably never say...
Nine states with the highest personal income tax rates lost $90.05 billion in taxable income between 2000 and 2010.
Illinois has the second-highest unemployment rate in the nation, a rank the state has held for five months now, behind only the state of Nevada. Illinois’ unemployment rate rose to 9.2 percent in July, up from 9.1 percent in June, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, or BLS. Today’s BLS release highlights how poorly...
The parents of the 30,000 displaced Chicago Public Schools, or CPS, students’ who will be attending new schools this fall are worried about their children’s futures. These fears are reasonable – what parent wouldn’t we be concerned about having their child walk to school along a Safe Passage route that was recently the scene of...
When people don’t like the direction in which their state is headed, they often vote with their feet. That’s precisely what Illinoisans did during the last decade, and they took their income with them. Illinois netted a loss of more $20 billion to other states through the out-migration of its residents from 2000-2010, according to...
The recent string of credit downgrades by Moody’s Investors Service should leave little doubt what the rating agency thinks of Illinois’ worsening fiscal crisis. For the past few years the state’s five state-run pension funds have garnered most of the negative attention in Illinois. Moody’s has already designated Illinois’ debt as the riskiest of any...
Gov. Quinn signed into law Senate Bill 2356, which increases speed limits on rural highways to 70 miles per hour. The limit increase only affects highways outside of urban areas. Highways within Cook, DuPage, Kane, Lake, Madison, McHenry, St. Clair, and Will counties will be able to opt out through local ordinances. According to the Chicago Tribune:...
Chicago’s fiscal crisis just got worse. Last month, the city received a rare triple-notch downgrade from Moody’s Investors Service, to A3 from Aa3. Now, Chicago’s parent government, Cook County, has received a downgrade of its own. Moody’s Investors Service downgraded Cook County’s general obligation bond rating to A1 from Aa3 due to the county’s “growing...