by Brian Costin Park Ridge Mayor Dave Schmidt wants to improve online transparency and is using the Illinois Policy Institute’s 10-Point Transparency Checklist as a best practice benchmark for his city in northern Cook County. As mentioned in the Park Ridge Journal: Schmidt has four items on his list including the city meeting the transparency checklist created...
Illinois’ pension problem dwarfs the retirement problems in all other states. Officially, the underfunding of the five state-run pension systems total $100 billion. But when more realistic assumptions are used, the shortfall exceeds $200 billion. Without real pension reform, every Illinois household is on the hook for more than $40,000 in additional taxes just to cover...
Though Illinois taxpayers should be disappointed that pension reform was not enacted during the scheduled spring legislative session, they should also be relieved that fake reform was not enacted. The competing proposals offered by House Speaker Mike Madigan and Senate President John Cullerton did not offer solutions commensurate to the severity of Illinois’ pension problem (Senate Bill 1and Senate Bill...
When lawmakers passed the record 2011 tax hike they went on record making promises to taxpayers about the purpose and temporary nature of the tax hike. Now it’s clear that those promises were actually lies. When passing the tax hike, Gov. Pat Quinn said: “We have some temporary tax increases that are designed to pay our...
In the fight for the highest gas prices in America, Chicago now reigns supreme. Customers purchasing fuel in the city are now paying an average of $4.59 per gallon. That’s $0.13 more per gallon than when we last reported on Illinois’ high gas prices at the end of May. Many have chalked up Chicago’s consistently high gas prices to...
Illinois legislators have a major decision to make: should the state adopt policies that will enable it to become a future hub of education innovation or should it institute laws that needlessly delay the policies necessary to create a school system that embraces technology? Thus far, Illinois has chosen the latter path. In fact, Gov. Pat...
by Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner Illinois added nearly three times more people to its food stamp program than it added in jobs over the past year – just another confirmation that the state’s economic model is failing. Between February 2012 and February 2013, Illinois added nearly 200,000 new enrollees to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program,...
by Paul Kersey Last year the Illinois General Assembly decided that up to 3,580 supervisors in state government would not be subject to unionization. Passing this legislation, dubbed the “management bill,” meant that Illinois would restore a well-established principle of labor law – that supervisors need to be strictly accountable to policymakers and the people...
by Brian Costin When it comes to proposing radical changes to government spending, Illinois Democrats vastly outdo Illinois Republicans. In fact, a group of five liberal Democrats from Illinois propose spending increases that dwarf the spending cut proposals of any Republican in the country by a wide margin. This information comes from a new National Taxpayers...
by Paul Kersey In the wake of the end of spring legislative session, it has become clear that the General Assembly left itself a lot of unfinished business for next year. Aside from failing to act on pensions and passing another budget with numbers that don’t add up, Illinois lawmakers also failed to make the...
Former Illinois gubernatorial candidate Adam Andrzejewski and his group, For the Good of Illinois, has created an app called “Open the Books”, which can be used to search 12 years of federal spending from their mobile phone. Quite the accomplishment. As Andrzejewski wrote in an editorial piece published in The Wall Street Journal: “If you...
by Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner The Bureau of Labor Statistics announced today that the national unemployment rate rose in May to 7.6 percent from 7.5 percent one month earlier. Non-farm private payrolls rose by 175,000. The payroll growth, which has averaged 172,000 over the past 12 months, continues to be significantly below the range needed...
by Ben VanMetre Illinois has a spending problem. State government spending has grown at three times the rate of inflation since 1990. Despite Illinois’ existing balanced budget requirement, the state hasn’t had a balanced budget since 2001. That’s because political leadership in Illinois has been ignoring the basics of good public policy for decades. Lawmakers had the...
by Ted Dabrowski Moody’s Investors Service downgraded Illinois’ credit rating to “A3” from “A2” after the General Assembly failed to move forward on pension reform before the end of the spring legislative session. The rating agency also says it has a negative outlook on Illinois’ credit: “The negative outlook reflects our expectation that Illinois’ pension...