by Mark Cavers Bloomberg Business Week reports that legislators in Missouri are moving to reject some federal money to fund work that would speed up rail travel between St. Louis and Kansas City. The mounting concerns over future costs to Missourians echo similar concerns in a host of other states that have rejected federal money. Over...

by Mark Cavers In January, the General Assembly passed a tax hike that is projected to take around seven billion dollars from the taxpayers of Illinois. Tax hikes like this one get a lot of attention from the media for the harm they cause businesses and taxpayers. But there are other government policies that can be just as harmful...

by Mark Cavers In the case of a government “shutdown” the government doesn’t actually shut down. Rather, essential services remain up and running: Military personnel in Iraq don’t suddenly fly home, TSA agents don’t stay in bed, and the IRS doesn’t stop collecting taxes (although, in a particularly cruel bit of irony, they stop sending...

by Amanda Griffin-Johnson Today, the Tax Foundation released their annual report on the Tax Freedom Day for each of the fifty states. The Tax Freedom Day measures the number of days Americans have to work to pay for all their annual taxes at the federal, state and local level. The national Tax Freedom Day for 2011 is...

by Brian Costin With election day rapidly approaching, and early voting already underway, citizens in a number of Cook County communities are in the process deciding on 10 property tax hike referendums. A 2006 reform to state laws intended to give voters an accurate estimate of how a property tax hike referendum would affect them....

Following the Senate Republicans’ press conference Thursday, Illinois Statehouse News released an interview with the governor’s budget spokesperson, Kelly Kraft.  In her interview, Kelly paints a doomsday picture of what Illinois would be like after cutting $6 billion from the budget. Kelly states the governor has already made dramatic budget cuts, but we know that’s not true....