Public pension numbers are by far the murkiest part of Illinois’ fiscal crisis, and the biggest. Pension numbers have been deliberately obfuscated for years by politicians intent on hiding problems and by many actuaries hired by those politicians who are willing to play ball. They’ve succeeded.

Reform is long overdue, and Governor-elect Rauner can do it alone after he takes office.

Readers here, and anybody who follows public pensions closely, are well aware of the gap between the numbers reported by government and the real numbers calculated using better, more realistic methods, like new ones from the Governmental Accounting Standards Board. Absurdly, Illinois now keep two sets of books – the official ones (that are widely reported), and the new ones required by the those standards (that are rarely reported).

Backed by a $300,000 federal grant, South Carolina officials are trying a new approach to what they call a particularly insidious problem: food stamp trafficking.

The pilot program gained approval from the U.S. Department of Agriculture this fall, and if successful, could provide a model for other states looking to limit trafficking of food stamps, formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

Officials use the word “trafficking” to describe the sale of food stamp benefits for cash, or the use of the benefits to turn a profit instead of to purchase food. They say stories about trafficking undermine public confidence in a program that, despite huge growth during the Great Recession, has seen other measures of error rates fall to historic lows.

Just like Bruce Rauner’s wife, I disagree with much of what the governor-elect is about. But the state’s new chief executive is right about one thing: Illinois’ tax code is broken.

Conservatives argue that tax rates, particularly on income and property, are so high that they distort the economy and put Illinois companies at a competitive disadvantage. They’re right. Just like liberals are when they say tax revenues overall have been so low that the state isn’t generating the income it needs to pay for critical services.

Outgoing Gov. Pat Quinn’s solution to this was the same as GOP predecessor Jim Edgar’s: Ratchet up the rates, but just on income. In the absence of more fundamental changes, that’s proven to be a big flop, sort of the fiscal equivalent of stacking a dormer on a house with a crumbling foundation. The state has tended to run up its credit card, leaving the inevitable bill for later.

Now that I’ve identified who migrants are, the next important question iswhere are they going? Policymakers don’t just care about migration in the abstract, but are actively concerned with whether their state or city or neighborhood is going to be filling up or emptying out.

There are a lot of ways to talk about where migrants are going revolving around whether we care about gross or net migration, and what geographic unit we care about. For my purposes here, I’ll focus on net migration, which shows how much the total population of an area is really being affected by migration. Gross migration flows that cause no net population change are still important, especially if the in-migrants are demographically or economically different from the out-migrants, but when policymakers and the media talk about an area gaining or losing people, they’re usually talking about net migration.

For geographic units, I’ll use two different levels of analysis: metro areas and states. States are rational units to analyze because state governments set policies, while metro areas rarely have governments that set policies. Rather, they represent amalgamations of city and county governments. Even so, metro area data can provide valuable insights for city and county policymakers in those areas. This week will be focused entirely on metro areas.

Nine months after a nephew of former Mayor Richard M. Daley pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter, not a single cop has been disciplined for letting Richard J. “R.J.” Vanecko get away for nearly 10 years with killing David Koschman.

And many of them can’t be punished because they no longer work for the city.

Dan K. Webb, the court-appointed special prosecutor who won Vanecko’s conviction in January, identified 53 police personnel involved in two botched investigations of Koschman’s death.

As investors across the country grew disenchanted with the risky auction-rate bondmarket in summer 2007, Bank of America officials became concerned that more trouble might lie ahead.

Auction-rate securities had been richly rewarding for BofA and other investment banks.

But the market was shaky, and by that summer the banks were spending billions to keep it afloat. Records show that during an internal discussion in August, a senior BofA official warned of a potential market “meltdown.”
Chicago’s public school system was about to find out what such a meltdown would mean.

Get ready for the Department of Broadband. On Monday, President Obama called on the Federal Communications Commission to reclassify the Internet as a public utility—like water or electricity—under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934. The goal: “to protect net neutrality,” Mr. Obama said in a White House YouTube video, an ironic venue for announcing a monumentally bad idea that could strangle the Internet.

For years the FCC has been inching toward imposing net-neutrality rules, which are sold as a way to ban Internet service providers from discriminating against content providers. In reality such rules would dictate what ISPs like Comcast and Verizon can charge for their services. The Silicon Valley crowd particularly likes the net-neut idea, because it would mean cheaper access for companies like Google and Netflix, who are heavy bandwidth users. President Obama’s announcement is likely to delight them—and liberal groups supporting supposed Internet “fairness”—because now FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler will be under enormous pressure to do the White House’s bidding.

But the Internet cannot function as a public utility. First, public utilities don’t serve the public; they serve themselves, usually by maneuvering through Byzantine regulations that they helped craft. Utilities are about tariffs, rate bases, price caps and other chokeholds that kill real price discovery and almost guarantee the misallocation of resources. I would know; I used to work for AT&T in the early 1980s when it was a phone utility. Its past may offer a glimpse of the broadband future. Innovation gets strangled.

Illinois voters overwhelmingly approved an advisory referendum last week calling on the General Assembly to increase the state’s minimum wage to $10 an hour starting Jan. 1.

The result prompted outgoing Gov. Pat Quinn, who made the issue a focus of his re-election campaign, to say he would spend his remaining time in office working to increase the minimum wage.

Whether Quinn will be handed a last legislative victory before leaving office Jan. 12 remains to be seen. An effort to raise the minimum wage last spring stalled in the Senate, where even some Democrats were lukewarm to the idea.

Are Illinoisans softening their opposition to extending the state’s temporary income tax hike?

As Gov.-elect Bruce Rauner remains vague on just how quickly he’d repeal the two-thirds increase adopted under outgoing Gov. Pat Quinn, a new survey out today suggests that the public’s attitude may be changing — a little — and that the new governor has a bit of room to tack back and forth.

The poll from the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University finds that a solid 56.1 percent of those surveyed oppose making the hike permanent, which had been Mr. Quinn’s goal. Of that 56.1 percent, 32.6 percent “strongly oppose” any extension. Just 32 percent favor extension.