QUOTE OF THE DAY
Greg Hinz: Is Illinois’ job glass half empty, or half full?
So is Illinois’ economy finally roaring back to life after an admittedly bumpy stretch? Or is it just a dead-cat bounce that won’t go very far unless the state selects a new leader?
That continues to be the question between Gov. Pat Quinn and GOP challenger Bruce Rauner as the two sides dish up tons of statistics in a half-full versus half-empty debate over the true state of the job market.
Mr. Quinn scored a breakthrough of sorts on Aug. 14 when the Illinois Department of Employment Security reported unemployment had dropped to a six-year low of 6.8 percent — finally within hailing distance of the national rate, and down more in the last year than any 12-month period since 1984. Even better, Team Quinn announced, the state now is adding jobs and not just losing people from the work force.
Bloomberg: How Your Pension Fund Became a Casino
In September 1974, Congress passed a law aimed at ensuring that U.S. companies could fulfill the vast pension promises they had made to millions of employees. Forty years later, that law is greatly in need of reinterpretation.
Known as the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, the law has been widely hailed as a success. It created standards for managing private pension funds that professionalized their operations — and that public pension funds, which invest on behalf of government employees, have also chosen to adopt.
In 1978, though, the Labor Department made an adjustment that has had vast consequences. Responding to political pressure and influenced by new academic thinking on portfolio theory, it reinterpreted the so-called prudent-man rule of fiduciary duty. Fund managers would be judged not on the risk of their individual investments, but on the risk profile of their investment portfolio as a whole.
TIME: Uber Just Hired Obama’s Political Guru to Battle ‘Big Taxi Cartel’
Uber has hired one of President Barack Obama’s top political advisers to help wage an increasingly fierce turf war with taxi cab associations.
David Plouffe, the Democratic strategist who successfullysteered Obama’s 2008 bid for the White House, will join Uber as Senior Vice President of Policy and Strategy and manage the company’s global campaign to extend its ride-sharing service to new cities, the company announced Tuesday.
“Our opponent – the Big Taxi cartel – has used decades of political contributions and influence to restrict competition, reduce choice for consumers, and put a stranglehold on economic opportunity for its drivers,” Uber CEO Travis Kalanick said in a statement on the company’s blog. “We needed someone who understood politics but who also had the strategic horsepower to reinvent how a campaign should be run.”
The Blaze: Obamacare Hypocrisy Reaches New Heights
The Obama administration has made 24 unilateral changes to the signature health care law,bungled the rollout, has not yet completed the payment mechanism on the $840 millionhealthcare.gov website and, according to a government audit, has allowed 92 percent of phony applicants to obtain coverage.
Now the administration is going after a handful of states for not enacting certain provisions of the Affordable Care Act in a timely manner.
The state of Tennessee recently received what some have described as an Obama administration ultimatum. The Center for Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program Services’ letter to Tennessee state officials focuses on the state’s failure to integrate their computer information system with the federal Medicaid application and enrollment system.
Chicago Tribune: Chicago is a hotbed for billionaires, firms report
More billionaires are born in Chicago than in any other U.S. city apart from New York, according to reports from two firms that investigate wealth.
In fact, one in every 200 billionaires in the world is born in Chicago, according to wealth research firms Spear’s Magazine and consultancy WealthInsight.
It helps if your last name is Pritzker, making you a member of the illustrious family that founded the Hyatt Hotel chain. Four of Chicago’s 11 billionaires are Pritzkers.
Chicago Sun Times: National union chief pledges $1M if Karen Lewis runs for mayor
The head of the American Federation of Teachers says the national union is ready to spend $1 million to help Karen Lewis unseat Mayor Rahm Emanuel if the Chicago Teachers Union president decides to run.
“I did say privately to Karen and at our executive council meeting that if Karen was to run, we would be all in,” AFT leader Randi Weingarten told the Chicago Sun-Times in an interview Tuesday. “In a race like this, spending $1 million would not be unprecedented for the AFT.”
Weingarten said Emanuel “has shown a deep disrespect for what public education is all about.”
Public Sector Inc: More about our bulging public school payrolls
Back in 2011 I wrote a piece in the Wall St. Journal about the increase in local government payrolls over the decades, focusing in particular on school systems and the rise in both teacher-to-student ratios and also the sharp increase in non-teaching employees. Some defenders of the schools wrote in to suggest the growth in employees had been driven by demographic factors, including a sharp increase in special ed students and students who spoke English as a second language.
Now the Thomas B. Fordham Institute has a new study out on employee staffing levels at public schools which also details the growth in non-teaching personnel. But the Fordham study looks in addition at the common reasons given for this growth, most especially demographic changes in student population over the years. The study specifically uses regression analysis to see if factors like the rise in English-as-a-second language students or special ed students can account for most of the sharp rise in public school payrolls.
They do not. As the study points out, changes in student population account for only a small percentage of the growth in school payrolls, not more than 7 percent in the variation among school districts in hiring for non-teaching personnel and teacher aids.
We don’t want to say the Great Taxi War of 2014 was an overrated attraction, but . . .
In Seattle, the city fathers in June shoved the contestants into a room and they quickly emerged with a compromise that made everyone suspiciously happy. Taxi operators will get a property right in a fixed number of medallions, arguably the worst, anticompetitive feature of the old systems back east. Yet Uber, Lyft and other newcomers, whose smartphone apps let users summon professional drivers and ride-sharing amateurs, will be allowed to operate freely.
In New York, taxi medallions continue to trade for $1 million-plus. Medallion Financial Corp, a lender to taxi owners, just reported one of its best quarters ever and is making acquisitions. The number of conventional taxi rides in the city continues unchanged despite a price war between invaders Uber and Lyft.
CNN: ‘Is it safe to hire?’ Business owners don’t trust recovery
According to an exclusive CNNMoney-Manta survey released Tuesday, 28% of small business owners said the economy is the “biggest challenge” they’re currently facing, topping issues like sales, regulations and financing.
The survey polled over 1,500 small business owners across the country. Even those experiencing revenue growth are hesitant to test their luck.
“We’ve done well as a small business, [and] banks are willing to lend us money,” said Victoria Aguilar, the founder of a small law and consulting firm. “But is it safe to bring on another employee?”
CARTOON OF THE DAY
