Category: Policy
Policy
Center for Public Integrity just released a year-long report grading the integrity of the 50 states. Read about Illinois here http://www.stateintegrity.org/illinois Grade given is a C, rank is 11th among 50 states.
Read about the research here http://www.iwatchnews.org/
Teach for a day, get a pension. State is broke, lose pension. Madigan works to restore pension.
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Teacher's Union Lobbyists substitute taught for one day and now have access to a the teacher's defined benefit program.
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Recently, a scandal has come to light about the misuse of taxpayer dollars involving some of Chicago’s political bosses and their allies running local unions.
In the 1990’s Chicago officials and their allies in the legislature cooked up a little bonanza for their political backers who ran the slew of unions that staffed city departments. If you took a leave from your city job, say, pushing a broom at city hall, after three or four years, to become an official with Local 10 of the International Brotherhood of Broom Pushers, you could still rack up credit towards your city pension. Not only that, but when you retired, your pension would be tied, not to your $15 per hour broom pusher salary, but your union boss salary, which often topped out over $200,000 per year.
So the people of Chicago ended up paying some union bosses nearly $160,000 a year in pension for a few years of actual city work where they earned sometimes less than $20,000 a year—all courtesy of the taxpayers.
Within t ...
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Rankings are an important measure to determine progress and growth for any entity. Where does Illinois want to be financially and economically? How do we get there?
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Since its passage in January, Senate Bill 2505 has created the largest increase in job loss in the 50 states.
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Yesterday, there was a terrific panel at the Brookings Institute that talked about conflicts in several states over constitutionally-mandated redistricting. Congressional districts are redrawn every ten years to reflect population shifts. Topics included the impact of redistricting on growing minorities like the Latino community, and various lawsuits of alleged gerrymandering. They also responded to questions from the audience. 1 hour, 40 minutes There are several take aways as to what we could have done better here in Champaign County, such as engaging the citizenry in the process, not just hold hearings at Brookens, and what can be applied to a similar process after the 2020 census. If you are interested, the discussion can be viewed here http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/CongressionalRedistricting6
An opinion by former Attorney General Roland Burris states that Illinois' Prevailing Wage Act doesn't allow wages on public works projects to go down for any reason - but they can go up.
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Minimum wage was a commonly raised topic during the last gubernatorial election cycle. In truth, Illinois has laws establishing several types of 'minimum wages'. Prevailing wage laws mandate wages paid to employees on public works projects. Illinois is one of 32 states with such prevailing wage laws. I'll be examining the issues with these requirements and questioning why wages aren't established by the free market.
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