If this Supreme Court strikes down the IRS subsidies in states without a state-based health-insurance exchange, Illinois employers and employees would see much-needed relief.
With great fanfare, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel recently announced an executive order requiring city contractors and concessionaires to pay their employees no less than $13 per hour. The move was highly touted in both the Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Tribune, as well as a number of other publications and television news broadcasts. None of these...
Politicians have made a mess of Illinois’ finances, in large part through their mismanagement of state and local pension systems. With most of the state’s pension funds heading toward insolvency, it’s no surprise that politicians’ actions – from using government-worker retirements as slush funds, to trading retirement benefits in exchange for union support, to taking...
Evidence that the Affordable Care Act, or ACA, is harming the nation’s labor market continues to mount. U.S. News & World Report Chairman and Editor Mortimer Zuckerman explained in a recent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal that less than one-half of working-age adults are working full time. Zuckerman lays blame to slow-growth and the...
According to a recent Gallup survey, only 60 percent of Illinoisans believe that this is a good state to start a business. Not only do we have one of the most negative views in the nation, but it stands in stark contrast to booming states such as North Dakota and Texas, where more than 80...
The Wall Street Journal’s article “Public Pension Red Alert” foreshadows more municipal bankruptcies countrywide as pension costs continue to spiral out of control. One of the cities facing the most stress nationally is Chicago. The city’s pension payments are set to jump to more than $1 billion as laws that allowed the city to skimp on pension payments...
School districts across Illinois waste more than $941 million a year by giving raises to teachers who earn their master’s degrees, even though most studies show these degrees do nothing to boost student achievement. In fact, even U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan thinks this is one of the worst ways to spend money in...
U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius is in damage control mode in the wake of the glitches and failures of ObamaCare’s grand unveiling. Her op-ed in USA Today calls the government’s ObamaCare website “simple, user-friendly.” She also appeared on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. But her next appearance might be in...
Federal officials are trumpeting the high “demand” that ObamaCare’s health insurance exchanges are experiencing, but their celebration is misguided. What’s the point of the ObamaCare health insurance exchanges if the end result is to dump the majority of Americans covered under ObamaCare into Medicaid? The truth is that more than three-quarters of the newly insured next year...