QUOTE OF THE DAY
Chicago Tribune: A money lesson for CPS
When it comes to back-to-school shopping, there’s a familiar ritual in many households: Salvage as many of last year’s colored pencils and markers as possible, then page through sales fliers for the best deals on school supplies.
Trying to get the most bang for your buck doesn’t make you a bad parent, or mean that you don’t value education. In this economy, the new normal is doing more with less.
But Chicago Public Schools is slow to learn this lesson. In the face of a budget shortfall, CPS increased spending for this school year. It also plans to borrow from next year’s budget to pay for this year’s operations. Fourteen months of funding will be spent in 12 months.
A series of nonbinding referendums will appear on Illinois’ November ballot, addressing issues the General Assembly already rejected this past spring. Among them will be a special section devoted to class warfare.
This nonbinding referendum – the so-called “millionaires tax” – asks voters whether the state should impose an additional 3 percent tax on annual income beyond $1 million with the sales pitch of increasing education funding.
Not only is this a bad tax hike, but it’s also a bad way to fund education.
Avery Gagliano is a commanding young pianist who attacks Chopin with the focused diligence of a master craftsman and the grace of a ballet dancer.
The prodigy, who just turned 13, was one of 12 musicians selected from across the globe to play at a prestigious event in Munich last year and has won competitions and headlined with orchestras nationwide.
But to the D.C. public school system, the eighth-grader from Mount Pleasant is also a truant. Yes, you read that right. Avery’s amazing talent and straight-A grades at Alice Deal Middle School earned her no slack from school officials, despite her parents begging and pleading for an exception.
WSJ: Rahm’s City Council End-Run
President Obama used his “pen and paper” to raise the minimum wage for federal contractors, ostensibly to end-run intransigent Republicans in Congress. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, on the other hand, is ordering a minimum-wage hike for city contractors to bypass a supportive Democratic city council.
The mayor last week issued an executive order raising the pay for 1,000 workers employed by businesses that contract with the city to $13 an hour in October from the $11.93 that most currently earn under a local living-wage ordinance. “This is a down payment and an effort to make sure the city of Chicago is on record to raising the minimum wage to $13 just like the president did on the national level,” Mr. Emanuel declared.
Earlier this summer, the mayor endorsed a $13 city-wide minimum wage. However, he asked the council to postpone acting until voters have their say on a non-binding “advisory” state referendum this November that putatively seeks to gauge public opinion for raising Illinois’s minimum wage to $10 from $8.25. The truth is that neither Mr. Emanuel nor Democratic state legislators who placed the referendum on the ballot much care whether voters support a wage hike. If they wanted to know, they could commission a poll. Or they could consider survey data that’s already available: A recent Chicago Tribune poll showed that 84% of Chicago voters back a minimum-wage increase.
New York Magazine: A Ladies-Only Cab Service Is Launching in NYC
If you’re tired of making stilted small-talk with cab drivers who immediately follow up “Where are you headed to?” with “Do you have a boyfriend?,” the soon-to-launch appSheRides may be just what you’re looking for.
SheRides (known nationally as SheTaxi) was started by Stella Mateo — whose husband Fernando is the founder of the New York State Federation of Taxi Drivers — and will provide women-driven cabs exclusively to female riders in New York City. Riders can use an app — available only on iPhone for now — to request the cars starting September 16.
The goal of SheRides is twofold: Mateo hopes that it will provide safe transportation for women who feel uncomfortable being chauffeured around by strange men (men drive 95 percent of cabs and livery cars in NYC), and that it will also empower women who have considered joining the taxi fleet to do so.
Chicago Tribune: State employers to lay off more than 2,000 employees in coming months
Illinois employers warned they will lay off more than 2,000 employees in the coming months, according to notices filed with state regulators.
Twinkie maker Hostess said it will lay off 418 people from its plant in Schiller Park, which it is closing. Layoffs there begin on Oct. 19.
For-profit education company Career Education Corp. is laying off more than 740 employees in Schaumburg and Downers Grove due to a relocation. The company, which has been battling a decline in student enrollment, said it lease in Downers Grove is expiring and it making more efficient use of its office space in the suburbs.
Northwest Herald: Illinois prisons still grapple with overtime costs
Some state prison workers in southern Illinois are making nearly $200,000 a year as the state continues grappling with overtime payouts topping $60 million, according to a newspaper report.
The prison system has made strides in paring overtime costs, reflected in the fact that 178,000 fewer overtime hours were worked over the past two fiscal years, Illinois Department of Corrections spokesman Tom Shaer told the Carbondale Southern Illinoisan. Still, he said, the department only saved $2 million….
Forbes: The Taxation Truth Revealed In Both Red and Blue States
Recent tax-policy developments in blue and purple states point to a growing recognition that penalties imposed on work harm local economies, ultimately hurting job creation and retention, businessreinvestment, and spending on critical social and educational programs.
The data that state leaders now have available to them provides a clear pathway for designing pro-growth tax policies and brings to mind Winston Churchill’s notion that “a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.”
A new report issued in mid-August by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) examines the growing evidence that blue and purple states are identifying income tax policies that they know are constraining growth, contributing to the state’s overall poor performance, and hurting employers and families.
Investors: The Worst Job Stat Continues To Get Even Worse
Amid all the focus on boosting the minimum wage and legislating living wages, virtually no one seems to have noticed what is happening to the workweek in low-wage industries.
Since December 2012, private industries paying up to about $14.50 an hour have added, on net, 972,000 nonsupervisory jobs with an average workweek of a mere 17.7 hours, an IBD analysis finds.
That doesn’t mean new employees are being hired for such few hours. Rather, it reflects a combination of reduced hours in existing jobs and short workweeks for newly created jobs.
WSJ: The Myth of ObamaCare’s Affordability
Whether the Affordable Care Act lives up to its name depends on how, or whether, you consider its consequences for the wider economy.
Millions of people pay a significant portion of their income for health insurance so they and their families can get good health care when they need it. The magnitude of their sacrifices demonstrates the importance that people ascribe to health care.
The Affordable Care Act attempts to help low- and middle-income families avoid some of the tough sacrifices that would be necessary to purchase health insurance without assistance. But no program can change the fundamental reality that society itself has to make sacrifices in order to deliver health care to more people. Workers and therefore production have to be taken away from other industries to beef up health care, or the workforce itself has to get bigger, or somehow people have to work more productively.
CARTOON OF THE DAY
