Barack Obama

Fixed Race To The Top?

08/27/2010
by Collin Hitt Illinois lost a very-high-stakes federal grant competition. The “Race To The Top” program has gathered headlines across the country for the better part of a year.  It wrapped up earlier this week, with 12 states and the District of Columbia splitting $4B in stimulus largesse to fund public education. Ostensibly, the grant...

Regime Uncertainty

08/25/2010
by Kate Piercy “Where are the new jobs?” asks John Stossel in his article today. Why aren’t businesses hiring? Well, Stossel concludes businesses will not start investing in new workers until the current “regime of uncertainty” ends, explaining: After previous recessions, unemployment didn’t get stuck at close to 10 percent. If left alone, the economy can...

Unfunded Public Pensions

08/19/2010
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...

Top Marginal Tax Rate of 88 percent!

By Chris Andriesen
08/17/2010
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...

Illinois Delegation Votes on State Bailout

08/10/2010
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...

Obamacare: It Really Is a Tax!

07/20/2010
by Joseph O’Malley Do you remember when President Obama pledged that he wouldn’t raise taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 a year? Or his argument with George Stephanopoulos in which he claimed the individual mandate isn’t a tax? Now the Obama Administration is arguing that the individual mandate is a tax! What is the reason for this sudden flip...

Public Sector Bailout?

06/29/2010
by Brian Costin Private sector employment fell during the 2000’s and was 3 percent lower in 2010 than it was in 2000. Public sector had no such difficulties. This graph originally posted on the Cato @ Liberty blog shows how public sector employees have show strong growth over the last decade, especially on the state & local level....

Slashing Budgets Across the Pond

06/23/2010
by Heather Wilhelm “Britain announced a far-reaching deficit-reduction plan Tuesday aimed at saving billions of dollars over the next five years,” reports today’sWashington Post, “becoming the latest European nation to slash spending amid increased worries about rising public-sector debt.” The austerity measures include $145 billion in cuts to public-sector spending (including a two-year freeze on...

Will $125 Million Help?

06/08/2010
Nationalized health care is sinking in popularity--but a new big-money PR initiative hopes to change all that.