Wirepoints President Ted Dabrowski said the city is paying people not to seek employment. “It comes after the lockdown policies of [Gov. J.B.] Pritzker and [Mayor Lori] Lightfoot,” Dabrowski said. “They shut down the economy, kept people out of work, and gave them money not to work, and now they are continuing that.”
City Council pay has been tied to inflation since 2006, when aldermen voted to give themselves automatic raises based on the consumer price index; That saved them the politically unpopular task of regularly voting on their compensation. But since that policy change, U.S. inflation has soared to levels not seen in 40 years.
In August, the number of jobs on payroll increased by 4,000 according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor. IDES said the state’s unemployment rate increased by 0.1% to 4.5% in August as well. The state’s unemployment is 0.8% above the national average unemployment rate.
The former heard of the discipline office at the Illinois State Police will get a chance to resume his lawsuit against Jenny Thornley, a former state worker who allegedly falsely accused her boss of sexual assault and used her political ties to Gov. JB Pritzker to get him removed, to attempt to thwart a criminal investigation into allegations that she falsified payroll records to rake in overtime pay.
“It is a manufactured crisis by ambush,” Mayor Lightfoot said. “Any dollar that goes to the state of Texas or the state of Arizona, every single one of those dollars needs to be recommitted to cities like Chicago, New York and Washington, D.C.”
Among the new guidelines was an update to testing requirements for school and childcare employees. Unvaccinated employees in those settings will no longer be required to twice twice weekly.
“The improvement is going to require putting deference, in some fashion with some guidelines, back in front of the judges that see these people day-to-day, that see the criminals in their communities, and who understand their communities,” Tom Devore said. “What we’ve really done is to centralize a lot of this discretion into a statute that was crammed through the legislature in three days.”
State tax revenues grew by $5.5 billion in Illinois in the fiscal year that concluded on June 30, exceeding $50 billion for the first time in Illinois history.
The disaster declaration gives Gov. JB Pritzker greater flexibility in providing resources to the migrants from the Illinois Emergency Management Agency and other state agencies; Pritzker is also activating 75 members of the Illinois National Guard to help distribute resources. Pritzker used the same powers to manage the pandemic, and two and one-half years later is still using emergency declarations to run the state.
“Imagine the problems if every government union in Illinois were empowered to strike over any issue. That’s what Amendment 1 could mean.”
Pritzker’s plan to phase out carbon-emitting power plants means curtains for a long era of self-sufficiency as well as billions in spending on transmission lines, a new report warns. The full report is here.
Rankings were based on FIRE’s analysis of five factors in students’ responses: “comfort expressing ideas,” “disruptive conduct,” “administrative support,” “openness” and “mean tolerance.”
The show’s crew was filming exterior shots at a funeral home when a man began shooting from the opposite corner just before 2 p.m. Earlier in the summer, bullets from a rolling gun battle flew into the Cinespace Chicago Film Studios on the West Side and damaged trailers used by the Chicago Med television series. And in the South Loop last month, a man reportedly lit an object and threw it toward the set where Justified was filming.
David Greising is president and CEO of the Better Government Association: “TIFs are built on the notion of ‘but for.’ In other words, without the tax incentive, the development doesn’t happen. And without the developer’s risk capital, the land stands idle. That ‘but for’ argument would be hard to make for a tract of property in a thriving suburb, within walking distance of a Metra stop, on the kind of flat, open land that developers find inviting.”
A tent encampment that has resided in Touhy Park since summer 2021 has led to debates about how to best help its residents while keeping the park available.
So far, 11 busloads of migrants have arrived in Chicago from Texas. Approximately 509 migrants have been sent here as of Wednesday afternoon, according to the city.
The panel includes federal and state officials who decide how the money from the Infrastructure Act gets distributed.
Illinois should aim to build up a now $1 billion rainy day fund by more than $2 billion to manage through future economic crises, state Comptroller Susana Mendoza said in pressing for passage this fall of legislation that would funnel more revenue to the once-barren fund. States on average hold reserves that would allow them to manage for 35 days. Illinois only this year tipped the scales over the $1 billion mark, reaching $1.039 billion, but that equates to just one week worth of operations, Mendoza said.
Illinois has a child food insecurity rate of 11.3%, which ranks #10 lowest among all states.
“Democratic Reps. Adriano Espaillat (NY), Eleanor Holmes Norton (DC), Jesús García (Ill.) and others are calling for $50 million in federal funding for “sanctuary cities” to cope with the new arrivals, while slamming Abbott and Ducey for “playing politics” with migrants’ lives. How rich.”
There are seven total justices on the Supreme Court in Illinois, four of whom are Democrats. Two of those seats that are currently held by Democrats are going to be on the ballot this November, and if Republicans can flip at least one seat, then they could see a host of legal challenges to measures passed by a Democratic-controlled General Assembly.
Prices in the Chicago-Naperville-Elgin area, as measured by the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers, increased 0.1% in August, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported. Regional Commissioner Jason Palmer noted that the food index rose 0.7%, and the energy index fell 6.6% in August.
Exploit compassion for undocumented migrants, blame Texas for a border crisis created by his own party, apply maximum hypocrisy and use emergency powers for political grandstanding. That’s what this is about, and it probably will work with Pritzker’s intended audience, his base on the left.
Matt Rosenberg talked with John Kass about the Chicago Scream controversy and the failures of Chicago’s leaders, the important data-driven work of Wirepoints and the institutional underpinnings of Chicago’s Great Unraveling.
Student outcomes were already dismal before Covid-19, but now they’re even worse due to the state’s draconian pandemic policies of school closings, remote learning and strict mitigations. Ted Dabrowski traveled to Geneva to speak to parents and concerned residents about who is responsible for the failures in Illinois education, the threat Amendment 1 poses to parents rights and what we can do to improve outcomes for all Illinois students.
Take U of I’s flagship Urbana-Champaign campus, with base tuition and fees now starting at $17,138 a year. In comparison, a Big-10 education for in-state students attending Indiana University-Bloomington or the University of Wisconsin-Madison costs nearly $6,000 less. Illinois schools cost more because most other states don’t have Illinois-sized pension debt.
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