There’s a price tag attached to the unprecedented federal money lavished on states under the pretext of COVID relief, which is over $9 trillion and growing. It’s in addition to higher federal taxes that will be needed to pay for it. It’s inflation, which is finally getting the attention it deserves.
Press reports of the Delta virus’ impact on children across the country have been alarming since July, when cases and hospital admissions jumped significantly after a bottoming out in June. Most of the attention has fallen on Florida and other southern states, but there have been concerning stories in Illinois, too.
“It doesn’t make sense how they can delay a year and a half and come back more incompetent than when we started.” That’s what one of the applicants suing Illinois told the Chicago Sun-Times about the state’s process for licensing marijuana retailers.
Imagine a husband going to his wife with a grand scheme to get his family out of the financial trouble they’re in. Out of control spending and too much debt has made a mess of their lives and his wife has been asking him for years to scale down spending and cut back excesses. Unfortunately, that’s never happened and now things are desperate.
If you think it’s exaggeration to call the situation at the Mexican border an invasion, read on. If you think it’s exaggeration to say that it’s a major and growing obstacle to containing COVID, keep. going. But if you expect to read something about our political establishment taking it seriously, forget it.
The Illinois Department of Public health took no time at all deciding last week to say it “fully aligns” with new masking guidelines issued by the Centers for Disease Control, including universal masking in schools, regardless of vaccination status. IDHP’s announcement came only hours after the CDC announcement on Tuesday.
Fifty words, added to the Illinois Constitution as an amendment, could be what helps save the state from an inevitable financial collapse in years to come.
The Illinois legislature’s biggest failure during the pandemic has been its complete abdication of responsibility over the management of the pandemic itself – Gov. Pritzker has been running the state’s response via executive fiat for over a year.
Illinois will never get back to any sense of normalcy as long as the media and Gov. J.B. Pritzker continue to push cases as the key measure of the virus’ danger to the general public. As we wrote last month, it’s not cases that matter, but hospitalizations and deaths.
Illinois is now being inundated with ads, social media and op-eds urging a "yes" vote for the Fair Tax by making the following claim over and over again:
Illinois politicians have Illinoisans arguing over tax hikes and tax schemes instead of what’s really needed to fix our state – spending reforms. Skyrocketing pension costs are the elephant in the room and yet no one is talking about them.It’s pension reform that should be on the Nov. 3rd ballot.
The pandemic, lockdowns, protests and violence have all drawn attention away from Illinois' biggest fiscal problem: its worst-in-the-nation pension crisis.
On Saturday, I spoke with Ted Dabrowski, president of Wirepoints, an organization that does public policy research in Illinois, with the goal of making Illinois a destination state again.
