-By Warner Todd Huston
Illinois ended 2010 as the most indebted state in the union. Sadly, not a thing has been done so far in 2011 to make it better. Instead, it will get worse.
As State House News reports, the state rings in at number 50 in the nation’s most broke states.
Illinois owed $37.9 billion more than all of its assets combined, including cash, investments and property, as of July 1, 2010, according to a recent statewide financial audit by the Illinois Auditor General William Holland and Illinois Comptroller Judy Baar Topinka.
So far and just like the states unpaid vendors, even taxpayers expecting refunds got stiffed because the state somehow forgot to put $1.4 billion in the refund fund for taxpayers that overpaid their taxes. Now those awaiting refunds will have to wait.
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Illinois Budget Deficit: Worst of the Worst”
The lesson: if you are a union member, better to sit on your rear-end and do nothing than find gainful employment.
In a small step in the right direction, the House of Representatives passed a provision to defund the 2012 Energy and Water Appropriations Act, denying the government the funds to enforce the new lightbulb standards that would have levied a defacto ban on incandescent bulbs.
On Sept. 18th and 19th in Washington DC, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is having open meetings for public comment on its proposal to slash the amount of time that it takes for prospective unionization of employees to occur. If you are at all interested in preventing this wild powergrab by Obama’s union-sold NLRB, you should try to attend these meetings.
It was hailed as a technological first. President Obama was to hold the first “Twitter Townhall.” The truth is more like it was a desperate attempt by the Obama administration to appeal to the youth vote in which nearly every poll shows him losing ground.
The political hack that Obama sent to be our ambassador to the United Kingdom has shown himself to be just that, a useless, inexpert, political hack. This hack
Back in 2005 Democrat Senator
My Friend Maggie Thurber has a great piece
My friend Iowahawk recently Tweeted (@iowahawkblog) an interesting fact:
Senator Tom Coburn (R, OK) is trying to break heavy with the Tea Partiers — and for that matter his own party — by encouraging Republicans to include massive tax hikes in the on going budget discussions in congress this year.
Cities, counties and states (not to mention the federal gov’t) all across the country are overspent, out of cash, and deeply in the red. One reality that has been hitting all these government entities has been a series of tough negotiations with government employee unions. Unions are loathe to take cuts, certainly, but the reality is that in many cases it’s either cuts or layoffs. More and more unions are realizing this and taking the cuts to avoid losing jobs. The foolish government employees in Connecticut seem to be insensible to reality, though.
There is a jester of a Chicago Alderman named Ed Burke who back in the early 1990s made local radio audiences laugh by his plaintive plea of “what about the horses” on the floor of Chicago’s City Hall. He was worried that horses in downtown Chicago’s carriage trade were somehow being mistreated and so he tried to pass all sorts of absurd new regulations in Chicago to help his equine buddies. His plea rings in my ears as I read this new story of the “
When Barack Obama threw millions of our tax dollars at General Motors to “save it,” the administration claimed that it would not involve itself in the “day-to-day management” of the venerable car company. New emails obtained by
Barack Obama’s interference in the business operations of Boeing new Dreamliner manufacturing project will likely cause thousands of workers in South Carolina to lose their jobs. Because of this, one Palmetto State worker is suing the federal government for its part in his probable future job loss.
President Obama claims that he wants to “create jobs,” and is happily touting several policies that he claims will create jobs in this jobless, non-recovery. Unfortunately, all his polices really do is shore up the high cost unions that kill job growth. As GOP Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConell says, Obama has “relentlessly pursued an agenda that is radically opposed” to job growth.
A four-year Apple store employee in San Francisco wants to
Only a few days ago I wrote about how 