Illinois lawmakers have called on IDES to publish a state audit detailing how much fraudsters stole in unemployment benefits during the pandemic, but that report has never surfaced. In Congress, House Republicans plan to launch their first investigation into fraud during the pandemic. The U.S. House Oversight Committee said it will hold a hearing Feb. 1 on what it calls the “rampant waste of taxpayer dollars in COVID relief programs.”

“While the FDA has dithered, dallied and delayed, more than one million of America’s kids have started vaping,” U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin stated this week calling on the agency to obey the court order requiring them to take action by September 2021. and remove all unauthorized e-cigarettes from store shelves.

The gaming discipline generated $290 million in state tax revenue for the 2022 calendar year.

According to LawnStarter, Illinois ranks as the ninth best state for those seeking to live off the grid. Illinois scores highest in the safety category, which includes measures like air and water quality, measures of natural hazards, access to health care, and the crime rate. The state’s lowest ranking category is affordability.

California lawmakers passed a law that would pay fast-food workers more—and the world’s biggest fast-food chain is slamming it. In a letter on McDonald’s website, the company’s president of the U.S. division, Joe Erlinger, says the measure “makes it all but impossible to run small-business restaurants.”

Eight states last week introduced bills or announced plans in a coordinated effort to increase taxes on the wealthy. The approaches to hiking taxes vary, but all would make the richest Americans pay more. The efforts are all in blue states—California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, New York and Washington—and their prospects are uncertain.

“Volkswagen filed a federal lawsuit in December that described a bill which overwhelmingly passed both Illinois legislative chambers and was signed into law in 2021 as, ‘crony capitalism at work: redistributive legislation that takes hundreds of millions of dollars from some (but not all) motor vehicle manufacturers and, for no public purpose, deposits that money directly into the pockets of politically favored Illinois (car) dealers.’ The automaker claims the law is costing it an extra $10 million a year.”

In Illinois, ranked choice has received little support from either of the two major parties. “We prefer runoff elections between the candidates receiving the top two vote totals,” says Steve Boulton, chairman of the Chicago Republican Party. “We see a mandate from a majority of the voters as a critical part of the legitimacy of our democratic system. [With ranked choice] voters are forced to rank candidates that they do not prefer at all, and even vehemently oppose.”

“There is nothing inherently wrong with allowing those who will have to live with a project like windmill farms to have an effective say about where they are located. One might even call that a common-sense approach.”

State Sen. Steve McClure, a Republican from Springfield and a former Sangamon County assistant state’s attorney, raised a concern that the bill allows “criminals that are dangerous to change their names.”