United States Congress

Obama: Adopting the Illinois Model

09/15/2011
by Emily Dietrich President Obama presented a $450 billion proposal to a joint session of Congress last week. He instructed lawmakers: “Pass this bill, and hundreds of thousands of disadvantaged young people will have the hope and the dignity of a summer job next year. And their parents – their parents – low-income Americans who...

Will Obama’s Speech Save Jobs in Illinois?

09/09/2011
by Emily Dietrich President Obama convened a joint session of Congress Thursday night to unveil his latest jobs proposal. Almost immediately, lawmakers and political pundits levied harsh criticism. Leftists expressed fear that the President’s proposal isn’t “bold” enough. The purported $450 billion price tag doesn’t come near the $1 trillion in spending some have agitated...

Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals Strikes Down Obamacare’s Individual Mandate

08/12/2011
by Jonathan Ingram Illinois cannot afford Obamacare. The Medicaid expansion in Obamacare is expected to increase Illinois’s Medicaid spending to $10.2 billion by 2030. This represents a 77 percent increase over 2008 spending. Illinois already faces a spending crisis, particularly within Medicaid, and the Comptroller reports even longer delays for payments to doctors and hospitals treating Medicaid patients are...

High Speed Rail Dead in its Tracks?

By Chris Andriesen
04/29/2011
by Brian Costin In the above video from 2009 the Cato Institute’s Senior Fellow, Randal O’Toole, talks about the impact of high speed rail in Illinois. Fast forward to April 2011, and it appears as if the national high-speed rail plan touted by President Obama is losing significant steam. This blog post from O’Toole explains. “President Obama’s dream...

1099 Requirement Makes a Comeback?

01/31/2011
Obama's recently released budget proposal includes a retooled version of the infamous 1099 tax reporting requirement in ObamaCare.

Mixed Messages: How Governor Quinn’s Tax Hikes Will Erase President Obama’s Tax Cuts

By Chris Andriesen
01/10/2011
The Problem Illinois families should be wary of plans to hike taxes at the state level that would all but wipe out the benefits of the bipartisan tax compromise between President Barack Obama and Congressional Republicans. In federal legislation that extended the Bush-era tax cuts, and also included a payroll tax cut, a four-member family...

What Governor Quinn’s Income Tax Hike Means to You

12/31/2010
by Collin Hitt Illinois lawmakers are considering raising the state income tax. Different plans have emerged, but each would damage Illinois’s economic recovery.  The plan that has been discussed the longest is one that would raise Illinois’s individual income tax from three to four percent, a 33 percent increase.  More recent tax plans have emerged that...