Four out of five Illinoisans would opt out of traditional Illinois public schools if they had the ability to send their children elsewhere.
The irony is that by empowering parents with more flexibility to opt out, the public schools themselves will improve and can become world class performers. Today they are laggards.
Read More...SPRINGFIELD, IL—He may be the father of modern economics, or perhaps the father of social science but to call Adam Smith the father of capitalism – as one close colleague puts it – is like calling Sir Isaac Newton the father of gravity. Newton didn’t invent gravity; he just figured it out. Ditto for Smith.
I say this in reference to the adoption of Adam Smith by the American left in recent years in an attempt to suggest that Adam Smith would be a proponent of their policies. The reference alone of Adam Smith being the father or inventor of capitalism gives away the lie.
Capitalism was a term coined by Karl Marx to demean liberty and free markets. By labeling free markets as an ideology – rather than an empirical observation (the methodology of the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment) into what was occurring in Smith’s world – it was hoped ... Read More...
This Thursday House Speaker Michael Madigan has scheduled a vote on a regional sales tax hike to stave off the Chicago Transit Authority’s overblown “doomsday scenario” of rate hikes and service cuts to pay for cost overruns and chronic mismanagement.
After facing down tax increase threat after tax increase threat, Republicans now have the opportunity to save taxpayers from $435 million in regional sales tax hikes and the real estate transfer tax. If they don’t, they’ll risk undermining the progress they’ve made re-building the anti-tax brand image of the Republican Party.
It hasn’t been easy being a Republican legislator in the Chicago suburbs these past few weeks. And this week promises to be particularly tough as every editorial page editor, reporter, and anyone any way connected to mass transit will be all over Republicans to abandon House Republican Leader Tom Cross and an electorate wanting the line held against new ... Read More...
Is Illinois 49th on Education Spending?…Does it Have One of the Lowest State Tax Burdens?...Does it Really Have Too Few State Employees? Stay for This Answer.
Is Illinois really 49th in education spending? Do we have one of the lowest state tax burdens in the U.S.? Do you really believe that Illinois has too few state employees?
That’s just a small taste of what Center for Tax and Budget Priorities President Ralph Martire (and respectfully stated my future Chicago Daily Observer columnist colleague) used on WLS-AM’s “Political Shoot-Out” last Sunday with host Tom Roeser. He tirelessly points to these data points in testimony, columns and in interviews to justify greater government taxing, spending and intervention into our lives.
But while they reflect real numbers, they are irrelevant at best and misleading at worse.
Let me explain why.
According to a 2005 paper by Ben DeGrow of the Colorado based ... Read More...
As soon as today, the House of Representatives will vote to override President Bush’s veto of State Children’s Health Insurance Program (S-SCHIP) expansion bill. The bill passed earlier this year with help from moderate Republicans – most notably Senator’s Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) in the US Senate.
The concept of the SCHIP was originally to fund health insurance for children in families that earned too much to be Medicaid eligible but were to poor to pay for insurance in the individual market, or they worked in a low-wage position in which employee health benefits were not provided.
The program has been somewhat successful in the expanding health insurance coverage to these groups of people. However, about half of those joining the program were dropping their private coverage in favor of “free government insurance.” In addition, states, Illinois being a chief culprit, were expanding the program ... Read More...
