Cutting your own salary is hard to do, especially when you’re an Illinois lawmaker. State Representative David McSweeney (R-Cary) introduced a bill reducing pay for members of the General Assembly and constitutional officers by 10 percent. The representative from north of Chicago has already voluntarily reduced his pay by 10 percent.

“We need to set an example as legislators”, McSweeney said. “We have $6 billion of unpaid bills. They’re trying to raise our taxes again. Legislators should lead the way.”

He said if his elected colleagues are going to slash the state’s budget this spring, they should start with their own pay.

Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner is taking on the state’s unions by proposing right-to-work zones in some of Illinois’ economically-depressed areas.

But Rauner says he is not advocating that Illinois becomes a right-to-work state.

On the city’s West Side, where African American men suffer one of the highest unemployment rates in the country, no one we talked to worried that the governor’s call for right-to-work zones might lead to lower wages.

An Illinois lawmaker has introduced legislation that would cut the pay of elected officeholders by 10 percent.

Barrington Hills Republican David McSweeney says lawmakers need to “lead by example” as the state grapples with a multibillion-dollar budget hole stemming from the expiration of the state’s temporary income tax increase. The legislation would cut the salaries of the General Assembly’s 177 members and statewide constitutional officers after the next elections for their respective posts.

The bill could face a tough road in the legislature. But McSweeney says implementing the legislation after future elections would adhere to a provision of the state constitution saying benefits won’t be diminished.

Labor reforms aimed at curbing federal overregulation and returning balance to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) are essential to enforcing a pro-growth agenda, according to a new report.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) report argues that the new Republican-controlled congress should make labor a top priority in the coming year to boost underemployment and increase growth. The recovery from the Great Recession has been sluggish in part because businesses, entrepreneurs, and workers are “subject to an array of obsolete New Deal-era labor regulations.”

Congress should refocus its efforts on reversing that trend, according to CEI.

Two high schoolers who say they were just trying to make some money are now in hot water.

As WCBS 880’s Jim Smith reported, Matt Molinari and his friend, both seniors from Bridgewater, were going door-to-door advertising their snow shoveling services in advance of the storm.

“We weren’t looking to break the law. We just didn’t know the law,” Molinari said.

Illinois Policy CEO John Tillman joined Mary Kissel on WSJ Live to discuss Illinois’ pension crisis.

U.S. states for years have asked Congress for federal legislation easing the way for them to collect sales taxes on Internet purchases, but now that a bill has been drafted, state lawmakers are resisting.

The National Conference of State Legislatures on Tuesday released a letter it sent to House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner on Monday that depicted a proposed online sales tax bill as an unconstitutional attack on states’ rights.

A draft of the bill by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte “not only imposes new taxes on consumers in non-sales tax states, it raises taxes on consumers who purchase products from higher sales tax states,” wrote the group, which represents state lawmakers from across the country.

Every state added jobs over the course of 2014, with 16 states posting at least 2 percent employment growth, adding tens of thousands of jobs to their economies.

North Dakota, Texas and Utah led the way in job creation, with employment in North Dakota jumping 5.42 percent, according to a Stateline analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data released today. Texas’ job growth was 4 percent, and Utah’s was 3.86 percent.

On the other end, 11 states saw job creation of 1 percent or less, with employment in Mississippi essentially staying flat — as of December 2014, employment there stood at 1,120,300, up 0.02 percent from 1,120,100 in December 2013.