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The ballot question asks voters to support a 0.025% tax increase that will increase a homeowner’s property taxes by an estimated $20 a year.
“We think that workers’ rights, workers’ safety, workers’ economic stability is best left in the constitution,” said Illinois AFL-CIO President Tim Drea.
Garza, the first member of the Chicago Teachers Union ever elected to the City Council, joins at least a dozen colleagues on City Council who have either stepped down mid-term since being elected in 2019, or announced they won’t run again in 2023. Garza chaired the Council’s Workforce Committee.
“By giving unions power, you give workers power,” said Marc Poulos, executive director of the Indiana, Illinois and Iowa Foundation for Fair Contracting. “Unions are one of the single-most democratic institutions in the country.”
“He professes to be a Christian,” Mayor Lori Lightfoot said Sunday. “This is not the Christianity and the teachings of the Bible that I know. And I think religious leaders all across the country are standing up and denouncing exactly this.” Lightfoot has slammed the decision to bus migrants as “racist” and added in her remarks Sunday that the policy was “unpatriotic.”
As for the Illinois amendment, “It’s extremely disastrous,” former Rock Island County Republican Party Chair Bill Bloom said. “When you talk about the little people in Illinois, I think it’s going to be an even more expensive disaster for them.”
“…(P)ronouns stifle student communication as we can no longer describe ourselves with verbs or adjectives as Mark Twain might have — e.g., ‘I was feeling blithe, almost jocund’ — at the start of a classroom lesson. Instead, Chicago teachers now tell our pre-pubescent kids that they must now conjure up constructed realities as birthing persons or people with penises to validate the fantasies of those who believe in pansexuality and other postmodern constructs.”
“You have seen fights shift to the state courts,” said Garrett Arwa, of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, “You have seen an increasing amount of money spent in some battleground state courts in the wake of these decisions.” Two seats are open on the Illinois Supreme Court, which currently has a 4-3 Democratic majority, and Democrats are using the issue of abortion to rally voters in an effort to hold on to their edge. If primary voting is any indication, Democrats face an uphill battle.
A republication of our Wirepoints column.
The number of homicides this summer is down compared with 2020 and 2021, but City Hall’s messaging on safer streets and fewer killings has at times been undermined by high-profile incidents, including those in downtown, as well as by increases in other crimes.
“As…reported recently, parents in Illinois and Montana quickly organized community pushback to planned ‘drag queen storytime’ events in their small towns, in one case gathering enough signatures to put taxpayer-funded drag shows for kids on this November’s ballot as a referendum item. Another recent…piece chronicled how librarians in several Republican-leaning suburbs of Saint Louis used their taxpayer-funded positions to organize a series of ‘drag queen storytime’ events this past June to coincide with Pride Month, even though they knew many local parents and residents
Under state law, any change to federal tax law automatically applies in Illinois, and that means that the exemption passed in the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 will also apply.
Sheila Weinberg of Truth In Accounting explained how taxpayers are being affected by the happenings on Wall Street: “The taxpayer liabilities on these are volatile. If the market takes a hit, then the assets are worth less, and therefor in the future, taxpayers could be asked to contribute even more to their pensions to cover the gap.”
“The Inflation Reduction Act, along with extending the insulin price cap and increasing competition among biologics, will ensure that millions more Americans will be able to afford the prescription drugs they need and, in many cases, paid to develop.That’s a win for everyone.”
Pat Devaney, of the Illinois AFL-CIO: “While the federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 since 2009, our sisters and brothers in labor have joined with workers to raise our minimum wage in Chicago and across the state, improving the lives of thousands of workers. It’s a rich and powerful tradition that every Illinoisan should be proud of.”
Mayor Lori Lightfoot said the issue is not sneding people to Chicago but doing so without proper warning. “There could be a level of coordination and cooperation, but he chooses to do none of those things and instead tries to send human beings not cargo freight but human beings across the country to an uncertain destination. And it has no idea what the circumstances are on the ground.”
It’s still much higher than Illinois’ average price on Sept. 4, 2021, which was $3.374, according to AAA. And it’s higher than the national average for gas, which is now $3.789.
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