Illinois

Quinn signs three Illinois Policy Institute-backed bills

By Jane McEnaney
08/16/2013
Although it has been reported that Gov. Pat Quinn has nearly 400 bills to sign, veto or change by the end of August, in the past week he has enacted three important pieces of legislation that the Illinois Policy Institute championed throughout the spring legislative session that ended in May. Last Friday, Quinn signed the Illinois Water...

TAGS: Illinois Water System Viability Act, Local Government Debt Reform Act

Quinn signs budget transparency legislation

By Matt Paprocki
08/16/2013
Today, Gov. Pat Quinn signed two pieces of legislation that result in greater budget transparency. The bills – House Bill 2947 and House Bill 2955 – which have both passed out of the Illinois General Assembly, mandate that the governor’s office posts the Illinois state budget online, and specifically identifies if there a budget surplus or a deficit within...

July unemployment: Illinois unemployment rate stalled at 9.2 percent

By John Klingner
08/15/2013
The Illinois Department of Employment Security, or IDES, announced today that the Illinois unemployment rate increased to 9.2 percent in July from June’s revised rate of 9.1 percent. Illinois’ unemployment rate is still 1.8 percentage points above the national average, which fell to 7.4 percent in July. The number of unemployed Illinoisans now stands at 604,700, up...

TAGS: unemployment

Nearly 110,000 Medicaid enrollees in Illinois found ineligible for the program

By Jonathan Ingram
08/14/2013
In January, the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services, or HFS, began a new project verifying eligibility for Illinois’ 2.7 million Medicaid enrollees. For years, state workers had failed to take adequate steps to ensure the people receiving Medicaid benefits were actually eligible for the program. As an Auditor General report noted, state workers...

ObamaCare: health insurance for the little people

By Naomi Lopez Bauman
08/14/2013
In a weekend appearance on Las Vegas PBS’s “Vegas Week in Review,” Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nevada, not only admitted that ObamaCare is designed to fail; but he also admitted that the law is one step toward a single-payer health care system. This admission should be added to the growing pile of ObamaCare’s broken promises. Just as many of the law’s...

North Carolina budget ends master’s degrees pay

08/14/2013
Studies have shown that paying teachers for earning a masters’ degree is one of the worst ways to spend money in education. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said as much in a 2010 speech: “Doing more with less will likely require reshaping teacher compensation to do more to develop, support and reward excellence and effectiveness,...

TAGS: masters degree, North Carolina

More food stamps: Another 20,000 Illinoisans added to SNAP rolls in May

By John Klingner
08/13/2013
More than 2 million Illinoisans – 16 percent of the state’s population – are on food stamps according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, enrollment numbers continue to rise in Illinois, and have been continuing to increase across the nation. Illinois added nearly 20,000 people to food stamp rolls...

Judge renames couple’s baby, needs First Amendment refresher

08/13/2013
We write a lot about the ridiculous things government officials in Illinois do, but make no mistake: officials in other states do plenty of outrageous stuff, too. In Tennessee, for example, there’s Child Support Magistrate Lu Ann Ballew. When two unmarried parents had a dispute over whose last name their child should take, Judge Ballew decided to...

Devil’s Night

By Paul Kersey
08/13/2013
I grew up in Detroit, and as far back as I can remember my hometown was in trouble. But if there was a time when people just gave up on the place, it was probably October 30, 1984 — just a couple weeks after the Tigers won the World Series — when fires on “Devil’s...

TAGS: Detroit

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FAQ: How the federal scholarship program would help Illinois students

Illinois students could soon benefit from scholarship money to help them find a tutor, attend ACT or SAT prep sessions, pay tuition, get special education services or assist with other academic needs. That will happen in Illinois only if Gov. J.B. Pritzker lets the state’s schoolchildren benefit from the Federal Scholarship Tax Credit program, established...

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Diana Graham

Process for unionizing non-state workers raises red flags

By Paul Kersey
06/19/2014

CBS Chicago: Illinois’ highest-paid superintendent receives $400K per year to oversee 1,200 students

By Ted Dabrowski
05/02/2016