QUOTE OF THE DAY
Wall Street Journal: U.S. Jobless Claims Drop to Lowest Level Since 2006
New applications for unemployment benefits plunged last week, reaching an 8½-year low and offering the latest signs of strength in the labor market.
Initial claims for jobless aid, a proxy for layoffs, fell by 19,000 to a seasonally adjusted 284,000 in the week ended July 19, the Labor Department said Thursday. That was the lowest level for first-time claims since February 2006 and below the 305,000 claims forecast by economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal. The prior week was revised up slightly.
“Claims are often volatile in the summer because of the timing of shutdowns at auto plants for retooling, but even so the downward trend in claims is evident and very positive for the labor market and the overall economy,” said Stuart Hoffman, chief economist at PNC Financial Services Group. PNC 0.00% “The current level of claims is consistent with monthly job growth of above 200,000, and the July employment report should be another strong one.”
Daily Herald: Investigations of Metra engineers on the rise for 2014
As of June, disciplinary investigations of train engineers at Metra had totaled 11, as many as the entire number of cases for 2013.
The upward trend comes in the wake of a probe by the Federal Railroad Administration sparked by three safety lapses in May and June that involved speeding or ignoring a signal.
Metra Executive Director Don Orseno said Wednesday he takes every occurrence seriously but noted the agency is one of the safest in the country, operating 750 trains a day amid 100 Amtrak trains and 500 to 600 freights.
Daily Herald: Jobless rates fall in all Illinois metro areas
The state Department of Employment Security says unemployment rates dropped in June in all 12 Illinois metro areas. It was the third straight month of across-the-board decreases.
Department Director Jay Rowell said Thursday in the agency’s monthly report on metro unemployment that the trend of encouraging employment data shows real economic improvement.
The department said earlier this month that statewide unemployment fell to 7.1 percent in June. That’s higher than the 6.1 percent national rate but the lowest point for the state figure since 2008.
Chicago Tribune: Emanuel sidesteps fairness question on suspicious red light camera tickets
Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Thursday defended the review system he has set up for thousands of motorists who got $100 red light camera fines during a series of unexplained ticket spikes, but sidestepped the question of whether it’s unfair that such citations were imposed inconsistently as a Tribune investigation found.
The city’s red-light system has come under intense criticism since the Tribune last Friday published an analysis of more than 4 million tickets issued since 2007. The investigation revealed numerous cases in which intersections that had issued just a few tickets a day temporarily began spewing them at rates of up to 56 per day. National traffic experts shown the findings concluded the tickets were issued unfairly because of faulty equipment or human tinkering at those intersections and suggested the city should refund those fines.
Instead of offering refunds to all the affected motorists, Emanuel has opted to offer at least 9,000 drivers ticketed during a dozen spikes identified by the Tribune a chance for a refund through a review process his administration has declined to detail.
Chicago Sun Times: Emanuel defends accounting gimmick in school budget
Mayor Rahm Emanuel said Thursday he signed off on a $6.8 billion school budget with an accounting gimmick right out of his predecessor’s playbook to keep cuts out of the classroom.
“New York City, Milwaukee, Philadelphia all get much, much more money-per-pupil than the city of Chicago. Close to about $1,500-a-student, if not more. Imagine if the State of Illinois wasn’t 50th out of 50” states in school funding, Emanuel said after groundbreaking ceremonies at riverfront office building.
“You act like that challenge just emerged. That challenge has been building. And this budget keeps those cuts away from the classroom.”
The Chicago Transit Authority said today it has launched a new “Build Chicago” partnership with the Chicago Federation of Labor as part of the CTA’s plan to rebid a $2 billion project to add as many as 846 new rail cars to replace some that are more than 25 years old and to create new jobs in the process.
The CTA originally sought bids for the new rail cars in 2013, but received just two submissions. Earlier this year the CTA opted to seek new bids in an effort to encourage a wider range of bids from rail car manufacturers.
But as part of the bid process this time around, the CTA said it will include a “U.S. employment” provision that will require bidders to provide the number and type of new jobs they will create as a result of the project. The added provision also will ask bidders to outline their job recruitment and workforce training plans.
Chicago Tribune: Illinois Supreme Court’s health care ruling hurts pension reform
The most alarming sentence in the recent Illinois Supreme Court ruling on retiree health care was not the one cited most often by tea-leaf readers that pension benefits must be “liberally construed.”
It was this one: “In light of the constitutional debates, we have concluded that the (pension) provision was aimed at protecting the right to receive the promised retirement benefits, not the adequacy of the funding to pay for them.”
Translation: The court doesn’t view the state’s finances as relevant to benefits. It’s not the justices’ responsibility to consider how the state meets its pension obligations — only that the state meets them.
Anyone want to go halvsies on a moving van? Last one out of Illinois, hit the lights.
Chicago Sun Times: Feds seek to extradite Emanuel’s ex-comptroller from Pakistan
Federal prosecutors are seeking to extradite Amer Ahmad, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s former City Hall comptroller, from Pakistan, where Ahmad fled — using a fake passport — after pleading guilty last year to public corruption charges in Ohio.
Ahmad, 39, has admitted in Pakistani court that he forged documents to flea to his parents’ homeland. He remains jailed in the city of Lahore.
It’s unclear whether the extradition papers filed in U.S. District Court in Columbus mean Ahmad will be back here anytime soon. A top official with the Federal Investigation Agency, Pakistan’s version of the FBI, told the Chicago Sun-Times last month that Ahmad could be sentenced to prison in Pakistan for illegally attempting to enter the country.
Joel Kotkin: To Fight Inequality, Blue States Need To Shift Focus To Blue-Collar Jobs
In the coming election, we will hear much, particularly from progressives, about inequality, poverty and racism. We already can see this in the pages of mainstream media, with increased calls for reparations for African-Americans, legalizing undocumented immigrants and a higher minimum wage.
There’s no question that minorities’ economic wellbeing has deteriorated since the economy cratered in 2007. African-America youth unemployment is now twice that of whites, while the black middle class, once rapidly expanding, has essentially lost the gains made over the past 30 years, says the Urban League.
Conservatives may not have the answers but it’s clear that a progressive regime has not worked either.
Brian Costin: Consolidate government in Illinois
Secter’s article loses sight of the reality of Illinois residents suffering from too many layers of local government and, consequently, the second-highest property tax rates in the nation.
In comparing counties by a “governments per capita” metric, Secter is incorrectly gauging the “efficiency” of local government based on population density. Population-dense areas, such as Cook County, will almost always rank as more “efficient” than rural areas.
A far more important metric is the layers of government per citizen.
Bloomberg: How generous are the top 50 S&P 500 companies’ 401(k)s?
A first-of-its-kind ranking of 401(k) plans at the 250 biggest companies in the U.S. found that ConocoPhillips and Abbott Laboratories are among those that provide the most lucrative retirement benefits. Among the least generous are Facebook Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Whole Foods Market Inc. The natural-foods grocer offers a maximum contribution of $152 annually.
ConocoPhillips, a Houston oil and natural gas producer, topped the Bloomberg News rankings of the largest public companies’ 401(k) plans, largely due to a matching formula that contributes 9 percent of annual salaries for employees who save as little as 1 percent of their pay.
Facebook finished last in the Bloomberg rankings, which were based on 2012 data, the latest available for all companies. The Menlo Park, California-based social media company didn’t offer any match at the time. It started making contributions in April to its 401(k) plan.
CARTOON OF THE DAY
