QUOTE OF THE DAY
KRDO: Seattle approves nation’s highest minimum wage
Seattle’s city council on Monday unanimously approved an increase in the city’s minimum wage to $15 an hour, making it the nation’s highest by far.
The increase was formally proposed by Seattle Mayor Ed Murray, and his spokesman said he intends to sign the ordinance on Tuesday.
Washington already has the nation’s highest state-level minimum wage, at $9.32. That rate also applies to the city.
Chicago Tribune: Illinois budget risks reversal of fiscal progress, Moody’s says
The fiscal 2015 budget passed by the Illinois Legislature late last week, which failed to include an extension of higher income tax rates, poses the risk the state could erode some of the progress it has made in reducing its huge pile of unpaid bills, Moody’s Investors Service said on Tuesday.
The Democrat-controlled House and Senate sent Governor Pat Quinn a $35.7 billion operating budget that does not include the extension of higher income tax rates enacted in 2011 that are scheduled to partially roll back at the end of 2014. Lower personal and corporate income tax rates midway through the state’s fiscal 2015 will result in an estimated $1.8 billion revenue drop.
“As a result, Illinois could face a structural deficit that leads the lowest-rated U.S. state to rely on credit-negative practices such as increasing an already large backlog of unpaid bills to achieve balanced financial operations, reversing significant progress of recent years,” the credit rating agency said in a report.
The Blaze: What You Need to Know About the Obamacare Enrollment Numbers
The Obama administration never stops. The president and his political allies continue to declare victory on Obamacare enrollments while still concealing the number of people who have actually paid for coverage.
With an end-of-year enrollment target of 7 million, the administration reported that 8 million Americans had “enrolled” in Obamacare, exceeding expectations. But that number is misleading – the president included in his tally millions of Americans who placed a plan in their shopping cart but have not necessarily purchased it.
According to recent insurer data gathered by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, only two-thirds of those selecting plans in the 34 federally facilitated Obamacare health insurance exchanges had actually paid for coverage as of April 15. The percent paid will likely increase – but one has to wonder why the administration has not only failed to release this data, but has quietly stopped releasing enrollment data altogether.
Reason: 6th Graders, Forced to Test Common Core, Demand Compensation
Sixth graders at a public school in Ipswich, Massachusetts, are sick of working as conscripted product testers for Common Core–aligned standardized exams—and have written a letter demanding compensation.
The exams are administered by the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), a non-profit state consortium tasked with designing the testing component of the new Common Core education standards. PARCC has been doing trial runs of its new standardized tests over the last few months. The states randomly chose which schools and classrooms get the honor of losing a week’s worth of classes to be guinea pigs for PARCC.
But Ipswich Middle School’s A and B period math classes have had enough, according to the Ipswich Chronicle:
The Economist: The $272 billion swindle
Investigators in New York were looking for health-care fraud hot-spots. Agents suggested Oceana, a cluster of luxury condos in Brighton Beach. The 865-unit complex had a garage full of Porsches and Aston Martins—and 500 residents claiming Medicaid, which is meant for the poor and disabled. Though many claims had been filed legitimately, some looked iffy. Last August six residents were charged. Within weeks another 150 had stopped claiming assistance, says Robert Byrnes, one of the investigators.
Health care is a tempting target for thieves. Medicaid doles out $415 billion a year; Medicare (a federal scheme for the elderly), nearly $600 billion. Total health spending in America is a massive $2.7 trillion, or 17% of GDP. No one knows for sure how much of that is embezzled, but in 2012 Donald Berwick, a former head of the Centres for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), and Andrew Hackbarth of the RAND Corporation, estimated that fraud (and the extra rules and inspections required to fight it) added as much as $98 billion, or roughly 10%, to annual Medicare and Medicaid spending—and up to $272 billion across the entire health system.
probes open at the end of 2013. A Medicare “strike force”, which was formed in 2007, boasts of seven nationwide “takedowns”. In the latest, on May 13th, 90 people, including 16 doctors, were rounded up in six cities—more than half of them in Miami, the capital city of medical fraud. One doctor is alleged to have fraudulently charged for $24m of kit, including 1,000 power wheelchairs.
Chicago Sun Times: Chicago Loop Alliance drops plan to expand taxing district
Pressure from downtown property owners and their local alderman has forced the Chicago Loop Alliance to abandon plans to dramatically expand a special taxing district — even as Chicago braces for Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s $250 million property tax increase to save two of four city employee pension funds.
Instead of expanding the boundaries of Chicago’s oldest special taxing district to include scores of buildings on Wabash and Michigan between Wacker and Congress and ten cross-streets, the Chicago Loop Alliance will simply ask the City Council to renew the so-called “special service area.”
“Chicago Loop Alliance and the SSA #1 Advisory Committee have decided to pursue a renewal– not an expansion. After listening to public opinion at two community meetings and one-on-one discussions with numerous property owners, as well as consulting with [downtown] Alderman [Brendan] Reilly, they’ve assessed there is consensus on the value of services provided within the current SSA service area and support for the renewal,” said a spokesperson for the Chicago Loop Alliance.
WAND-TV: The $1.8 Billion Budget Gap
The Illinois legislature left behind a bloated and unbalanced budget when it left town last Friday.
If the states income tax rolls back from its current 5% rate to 3.75%, as it is scheduled to do in January, it could punch a big hole in the budget. To the tune of $1.8 billion.
A Springfield based think tank, The Illinois Policy Institute, says taxes can drop and the $1.8 billion can be made up in five steps.
Chicago Tribune: Prosecutors play undercover recording of state rep being paid cash bribe
The deal allegedly went down a few days before the 2012 primary on a quiet street in the Bucktown neighborhood, far from state Rep. Derrick Smith’s stronghold on Chicago’s rough-and-tumble West Side.
Smith, a freshman legislator trying to win his first election after being appointed a year earlier, watched as his trusted campaign soldier pulled up in the dusty yellow school bus he’d been using to crisscross Smith’s sprawling district, doing grunt work like planting lawn signs and distributing fliers.
The worker – a felon named Pete who was secretly wearing a wire for the FBI – got into Smith’s car at Cortland Street and Wolcott Avenue carrying a white envelope. There, in the shadow of Drummond Elementary School, Pete removed stacks of crisp $100 bills that had been paper clipped together and started counting.
CARTOON OF THE DAY
