economy

Professor Michael Coppedge from Notre Dame University presents, “Venezuela Collapses.” Venezuela used to be the richest country in South America and a showcase of stable democracy. Now it is an unstable dictatorship with a collapsing economy. What happened? What’s next?

Americans have been waiting for a solid pay raise for years. Maybe there's good news awaiting them as the country employs more people.

The U.S. economic recovery has gone on for eight long years, and the unemployment rate is at a low 4.4 percent. But wage gains have barely budged.

That's got economists scratching their heads.

Small-business owners are giving mixed reviews regarding the latest Senate proposal designed to slowly raise the minimum wage and cushion payroll costs. The legislation, which passed the Senate earlier this month and now pending in the House, would immediately bring the minimum wage from $8.25 to $9 an hour and then increase it by 50 cents per year until it reached $11  in 2019. The climb in wages would happen more gradually than called for under previous bills from sponsor Sen. Kimberly Lightford, a Maywood Democrat. 

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A WUIS ENGAGE BREAKFAST
May 2, 2014, 8-9:30 a.m.
Hoogland Center for the Arts - Theatre III
AUDIO SPECIAL COMING SOON!

Special guest, Chris Farrell, is coming to Springfield to share his thoughts and take your questions about education and our local economy.   

  Guess what? 

State tax cuts don’t improve economic growth.

No, that’s not an April Fool’s Day zinger.

Rather, it’s the conclusion of a report issued last month by the Fiscal Policy Center at Voices for Illinois Children, a nonpartisan advocacy organization for the state’s youngsters (Poor Finances, Uncertainty about Looming Revenue Collapse Threaten State Economy).

After twelve years as President of the Illinois Chamber of Commerce, Doug Whitley's retiring next year.

Whitley says he's leaving disappointed, as the latest data showed Illinois with the second highest unemployment in the nation, behind Nevada.

And he says political leaders haven't done enough about it, except for one - Chicago's mayor: "With the exception of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, I don't hear any other political leaders in our state talking about jobs, trying to recruit jobs, trying to announce new jobs and showing a sincere concern with unemployment," Whitley says.

As I grow older, I reflect more on the past and worry more about the future, not just for myself but for my grandchildren, whose ages range from 2 months to 10 years. 

Although the federal stimulus package is increasingly unpopular among the American public, there’s little doubt that Illinois’ top Democrats support it. In mid-September, U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin and Gov. Pat Quinn came to Alton to tout the fact that Illinois became the first state in the nation to start work on high-speed rail improvements paid for by the stimulus bill.

Years ago, a group of legislative back-benchers dubbed themselves “The Mushroom Caucus.” The moniker was apt, they explained, because leadership “keeps us in the dark and feeds us horse [manure].”

If Illinois voters are feeling a strong sense of kinship with those old-time lawmakers just a few days after the November election, they certainly can’t be blamed.

Illinois faces its worst fiscal crisis in eight decades, a daunting challenge for the state’s purported leaders. So how have they responded?

In a word, abysmally. Indeed, the leadership deficit almost rivals the state’s dollar shortfall. Consider:

In his budget memo last month — at 21 minutes, too short and devoid of specifics to merit being called an address — Gov. Pat Quinn essentially punted.

  Illinois made the Top 10 last month.

Not Bruce Weber’s Fighting Illini, a disappointing 4-2 and unranked through the first six games of the young basketball season.

Rather, the Prairie State itself, tied for ninth with Wisconsin in a national ranking of states on shaky financial footing. The top spot went to California, so Illinois’ elevated status is nothing to brag about.

“Wait ’til next year,’’ for more than a century the lament of long-suffering fans of the Chicago Cubs, aptly describes the approach Illinois leaders are taking to the state’s budget woes heading into the fall legislative session this month.

Consider the setting:

• The bills keep piling up, to the tune of $2.8 billion and counting at the end of the last budget year, according to the state comptroller’s office.

• Thousands of state workers face layoffs, adding to a jobless total already at its highest level in 26 years.

The economic implosion over the last 20 months caught many of us by surprise. We had confidently ridden the stock market’s ascent to the heady all-time highs of the Dow Jones Industrial and Standard & Poor’s 500 indexes in October 2007, and then hung on dearly as those numbers plummeted to 13-year lows earlier this year. The roller-coaster ride left many of us dizzy and wondering what in the world had happened. Not to mention a whole lot less financially solvent.

"Run government like a business." We've all heard the familiar refrain, typically as a pledge from a political candidate or as a demand from a government critic.

The late state Sen. Aldo DeAngelis may have put the matter most succinctly. In the summer of 1989, he was listening none-too-patiently to criticism of the state's decision to grant Sears, Roebuck & Co. a $61 million financial incentive package, sweetened by tax breaks and development benefits, when the company threatened to move its Merchandise Group to North Carolina or Texas. Critics, we reported then, were suggesting to the Legislative Audit Commission that Sears might have snookered the state out of a good deal of public cash.