We give about 1% of our budget in foreign aid mostly to countries that hate us. We borrow 47 cents for each dollar we spend plus interest. This means our cost for Foreign aid is over 40 Billion dollars plus interest. The Population of the United States is about 322 Million. This means each person could get $124,326 if the money was given to our own population. This does not include military aid, humanity aid, food aid, and aid sent from private individuals and groups.
Our economy is in the dumps, we have the working poor, very poor, and the homeless. The cost of healthcare is continually rising, and their is no end in sight for increased taxes on local levels and some States like Illinois that are in serious decline.
I can’t see the logic in borrowing money to give away in the first place. No person in their right mind would borrow with the purpose of giving it away. Imagine if every citizen received $60,000 from the government tax free.
The point is that money spent on our own people is most important, but only a failed government would even think of borrowing money to give it away.
I find it amusing that the two Democratic front-running presidential candidates are both hanging their hats on gun control. It’s a testament to the reality that they are not simply liberals but rather stupid liberals. Setting aside momentarily that the fundamental concept of progressive gun control is morally and pragmatically bankrupt, one need only look at public opinion to see the reality of it.
According to the latest IBD/TIPP poll, just 42% of the public thinks stricter gun control laws will help keep guns out of the hands of criminals, while 52% think increased gun ownership increases public safety. The poll also found that 42% of adults say that they own or someone in their household owns a gun, and 28% say they are planning to buy one for security or protection.
The simple fact is John Q overwhelmingly agrees with gun-rights groups that the Second Amendment “will always be a relevant and necessary safeguard against tyranny.” Fully 72% side with that view. Support for this view crosses demographic and ideological lines: 52% of Democrats feel this way, as do 52% of those who don’t own or plan to buy a gun. Overall, just 23% of those polled think that the Second Amendment “is no longer relevant or necessary in modern-day America.” All of this comes after seven years of the president shamelessly stepping over bodies to get in front of a camera and make yet another pitch for gun control that would have done nothing to stop the tragedy du jour.
When I think of people I’d love to see hoisted upon their own petard, Governor Terry McAuliffe of Virginia comes immediately to mind. McAuliffe was Chairman of the Democratic National Committee from 2001 to 2005 and has been a friend of the Clintons, one of the few that haven’t had a fatal accident or committed suicide for no apparent reason.
Democrats decided to focus on Virginia’s midterm election and poured millions of dollars into the state Senate election. Bloomberg alone dropped several million. The night before the election, McAuliffe appeared on MSNBC literally begging voters to flip just one seat so Democrats could regain control and he could enact new gun-control measures. Nothing happened: zippo, nada, no change.
Rebounding from that disaster, Virginia’s Democratic Attorney General unilaterally decided to break the state’s concealed-carry reciprocity agreement under which Virginia’s concealed-carry permits were honored by 25 other states. The ink wasn’t dry before the paper was covered with the you-know-what that hit the proverbial fan. McAuliffe, coward to the core, immediately undid the deed in a deal with Republicans, and it gets better.
The Republicans bullied McAuliffe to include more pro-Second Amendment concessions including a mandate that Virginia recognize permits from all states and create reciprocity agreements with every state that wants one. The deal literally cut the Democrats off at the knees.
Add to all this a recent Appellate Court decision favoring the Second Amendment, other pro-Second Amendment actions and the dismal murder rates of Democrat-controlled cities with draconian gun control laws, and it’s no wonder people are abandoning their anti-Second Amendment position faster than rats jumping off a sinking ship. So when liberal nut balls scream for more gun control, I’m in there rooting for ’em. The more they demand, the more the public turns its collective back on them. With the general election looming on the horizon, I find I’m becoming calmer all the time about it. Except, you know, in Chicago, where there’s a long history of the dead voting Democrat.
Editors Note: Is then Concept of Killing American citizens by a death of 1000 cuts the end goal. The Democrats are bringing in illegals, giving them cash,food, and housing with better free medical plans than most Americans. These people are mostly young men who take our jobs which are scarce, mixed in with terrorists who will do us harm, and making it worse they have no intention of assimilating into our society.
We give about 1% of our budget in foreign aid mostly to countries that hate us. We borrow 47 cents for each dollar we spend plus interest. This means our cost for Foreign aid is over 40 Billion dollars plus interest. The Population of the United States is about 322 Million. This means each person could get $124,326 if the money was given to our own population.
Add in the money for free benefits to illegal and the dollars become staggering. We don’t have to be isolationist but we sure should not be the worlds sucker. Germany was until recently the strongest country in Europe. Their leaders like ours sold them out.
Image: Senate Democrats Introduce Bill to Provide Free Lawyers to Illegals (Wire Services Photo)
By Todd Beamon | Friday, 12 Feb 2016 05:18 PM
Led by Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, Democrats have introduced legislation to provide lawyers paid for by the government to illegal immigrant children and mothers to help them navigate the complex legal system since crossing the U.S. border from Central America in recent years.
“Deportation means death for some of these people,” the Nevada senator told The Washington Times after the bill was introduced on Thursday. “Given the life-and-death consequences of deportation to this region, we must ensure that we are not putting asylum-seeking women and children in harm’s way.
“We can do this by making sure that these desperate women and children have a lawyer.”
Democrats included the lawyers with other protections proposed for illegals, among them allowing aliens to delay deportation proceedings until they gain access to their full government file, the Times reports.
Illegals can hire their own attorneys, but the government does not pay for them.
Breaking News at Newsmax.com
Just as the pressure on the Emanuel Administration grows – the result of rapidly compounding problems in the Chicago Public School System, a scandalous response to allegations of police misconduct, the collapse of social service agencies, and an exodus of families and businesses – the word came down from Washington, DC that the President would head to Springfield to address the General Assembly.
Coincidence? Not likely. No matter how they try to spin it, the disaster that continues to unfold in Chicago has its roots firmly planted in the corruption and incompetence of ruling class politicians. For decades, they ran the city and the state unchecked. The Chicago Machine needs to take the heat off. So, Rahm opened up his coveted black book and called in a diversion.
While we appreciate the President’s message of hope and his call for legislative redistricting, his speech failed to address the real problem. Ironically, his speech was emblematic of the real problem, which is this: Chicago’s crisis is the state’s crisis. And that crisis is so big that even the most acclaimed diplomat cannot distract us from it. Rahm Emanuel and the Springfield Ruling Class think that you and your families and neighbors can be distracted long enough to get them through the next election. They have been telling you they are going to fix our failing systems for years. But under their leadership, the City of Chicago and State of Illinois has descended into ruin.
The fight has to be taken to the core of the problem. Under the leadership of Mike Madigan, John Cullerton and Rahm Emanuel we have seen debt rise, education fail, and business and families fleeing.
At the Illinois Opportunity Project, we remain laser-focused on the policies that will create opportunity and economic freedom for families and businesses. Join our Policy Revolution today. As President Obama once said, “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.” Let’s transform Illinois, together.
Why there’s a war on cash; it’s about central banks consolidating power
The war on cash has gone from overt to covert. Having expended all their ammo with Quantitative Easing to infinity and zero interest rate policy (ZIRP), central banks are now looking toward negative interest rates.
What are negative interest rates? Right now, banks pay only slightly above 0 percent interest on savings. In reality, that’s already a negative rate of return. Real inflation (not the government’s fiction inflation) of the money supply is running north of 7 percent. So your money depreciates while in savings. You might as well hide it under the mattress.
But banksters now are looking for ways to make use of cash difficult and also charge people a fee (negative interest) to deposit and hold their money. Likewise, all deposits are now subject to a “haircut” if the bank is about to go belly-up. That means banksters will skim some off the top of all deposit accounts in order to keep the “too-big-to-fails” afloat.
JP Morgan Chase recently implemented new controls on cash. Want to make a cash deposit or pay a loan or credit card with cash? You must show ID. And now Citibank is preparing new policies for cash deposits. Cash deposits to an account will require the depositor to state the purpose of the deposit, provide a Social Security number, provide identification and provide a place of employment and job type.
Apparently there’s begun such a huge increase in people using cash to pay off debts for other people or expand other people’s savings accounts that banksters are becoming concerned. (Excuse the sarcasm.)
So why are banksters suddenly opposed to cash? There are three reasons (at least): they can’t control or track its use, to prevent people from pulling their money out of banks if negative interest rates (where people pay the bank to hold their cash) are introduced, and to consolidate their power.
Of course, that is not the excuse the banksters use. They claim cash is tool of criminals. In a report for the Harvard Kennedy School for Business, Peter Sands proposes eliminating “high value currency notes” like $100 bills because, “Such notes are the preferred payment mechanism of those pursuing illicit activities, given the anonymity and lack of transaction record they offer, and the relative ease with which they can be transported and moved. By eliminating high denomination, high value notes we would make life harder for those pursuing tax evasion, financial crime, terrorist finance and corruption.”
Sands would know a thing or two about “financial crime, terrorist finance and corruption,” having formerly led the international bank Standard Chartered, which forked over $340 million in settlement money to the Feds over claims that it laundered hundreds of billions of dollars for Iran and lied to regulators.
Now, banksters around the world are calling for the abolition of cash. Last month, Norway’s largest bank, DNB, called for the country to stop using cash to reduce black market sales and crimes such as money laundering. “There are so many dangers and disadvantages associated with cash, we have concluded that it should be phased out,” DNB executive Trond Bentestuen said.
The CEO of Deutsche Bank calls cash “terribly inefficient and expensive.” A recent Bloomberg article called cash and coins “dirty and dangerous, unwieldy and expensive, antiquated and so very analog.”
Of course the excuse for the ongoing restriction of personal privacy and personal liberty is always crime. The government promotes crime and then uses the threat of crime to restrict your liberty. Government oppression under the color of law is to reduce the freedom of honest citizens. Criminals and crooks pay no attention to laws. Any child knows this.
The Financial Times tells us another reason for a cashless society:
[T]he introduction of a cashless society empowers central banks greatly. A cashless society, after all, not only makes things like negative interest rates possible, it transfers absolute control of the money supply to the central bank, mostly by turning it into a universal banker that competes directly with private banks for public deposits. All digital deposits become base money.
And finally, economics professor and creator of QE tells us that with negative interest rates:
…banks’ margins will stay low and the financial situation of the banks will stay precarious and indeed become ever more precarious… As a result banks that mainly engage in traditional banking, i.e. lending to firms for investment, have come under major pressure, while this type of ‘QE’ has produced profits for those large financial institutions engaged mainly in financial speculation and its funding.
The policy of negative interest rates is thus consistent with the agenda to drive small banks out of business and consolidate banking sectors in industrialised countries, increasing concentration and control in the banking sector.
It also serves to provide a (false) further justification for abolishing cash. And this fits into the Bank of England’s surprising recent discovery that the money supply is created by banks through their action of granting loans: by supporting monetary reformers, the Bank of England may further increase its own power and accelerate the drive to concentrate the banking system if bank credit creation was abolished and there was only one true bank left – the Bank of England. This would not only get us back to the old monopoly situation imposed in 1694 when the Bank of England was founded as a for-profit enterprise by private profiteers. It would also further the project to increase control over and monitoring of the population: with both cash and bank credit alternatives abolished, all transactions, money creation and allocation would be implemented by the Bank of England.
Even local governments are passing laws prohibiting the use of cash for the purchase of second-hand items as a way of gaining more tax money.
I have long warned Personal Liberty Digest® and Bob Livingston LetterTM readers to get their money out of banks, keep some cash on hand for emergencies, and buy gold and silver. I would also add the need to store food and water and ammo for your guns.
We are in for interesting times ahead. They may not be pleasant.
Vote by mail in Will County by calling 815 740-4626 and asking for a ballot to be mailed to you.
If you need information on a Candidate google their name.
Odds are you’re unlikely to vote in the March 15 general primary election. That’s a shame, because it’s easier than ever before to cast a ballot and participate in our democracy.
Voting is the answer to all our state and local problems. Fed up with the gridlock over the lack of state budget? Then vote. Tired of hearing about budget deficits and unfunded pension obligations? Vote! Sick of reading about public officials who only seem to care about raising enough money to get elected? Yep, vote.
Yet relatively few of us actually exercise our right to vote. We think our vote doesn’t matter, or we don’t know enough about the candidates and issues to cast a ballot. Or we just don’t like any of the choices.
“I think people are disgusted,” said Will County Clerk Nancy Schultz Voots.
If past presidential primary elections are any indication, about one in five registered voters will vote in this primary. In 2012, for example, the total turnout was just shy of 21 percent in Will County. More than twice as many Republicans voters cast ballots than Democrats, when there were six Republican candidates in the field and incumbent Barack Obama was seeking his second term.
In the 2008 primary, the turnout was much higher: 43 percent, with voters choosing from nine Republicans and seven Democrats. In the 2004 primary, Will County turnout was 28.5 percent. In 2000, it was 22.7 percent. In 1996, it was 24 percent.
Voter turnout tends to depend on the type of election and peaks in the November general elections when voters choose a president every four years. In Will County, turnouts for those elections were 71.2 percent in 2012, 76.1 percent in 2008, 73.7 percent in 2004 and 70.4 percent in 2000.
Fewer voters participate in elections for governor and other offices. Turnout for those November general elections in Will County was 51 percent when Bruce Rauner beat Pat Quinn in 2014. It was 52.4 percent for the 2010 Quinn/Brady race, 46.6 percent for the 2006 Blagojevich/Topinka contest and 50.4 percent for the 2002 Ryan/Blagojevich race.
Turnout is even worse for the gubernatorial primaries, averaging 21.7 percent over the past 10 elections dating back to 1978, and pulling a paltry 15.6 percent in March 2014.
The saddest turnout figures, though, are for local races where voters could have the greatest impact. Consolidated elections for city council, village board, townships, libraries, schools, park districts and fire districts are held every April of odd-numbered years in Illinois. In 2015, Will County turnout was a pathetic 15 percent. Between 2007 and 2013, turnout was about 18 percent. Between 1995 and 2005, it was about 25 percent. In 1983, it was nearly 31 percent. Not a great number, but twice as high as it is today.
Voots has seen a lot of changes since becoming clerk in 2002. Will County’s population has grown to nearly 700,000 residents, of whom 392,913 are registered voters. Children, incarcerated inmates and non-U.S. citizens cannot vote. This will be the second election in which 17-year-olds can vote in the primary if they will turn 18 by the general election in November.
The clerk’s office tries to educate the public about the voting process and what contests will be decided in upcoming elections. Ahead of the March primary, the clerk mailed information to households with registered voters, telling them the location of their polling place and showing them a sample ballot.
In the past, people had to register to vote ahead of elections, and the registration cutoff was about a month prior to elections. Now you can register and vote on Election Day. Still, the clerk encourages citizens to register in advance to avoid slowing down the voting process at polling places.
There’s no longer any reason to risk inclement weather and long lines at the polling place on March 15. Early voting started Feb. 4, and the clerk sent out about 2,600 ballots by mail that day.
“Anybody can vote by mail,” she said. “They can vote at the privacy of their kitchen table.”
Will County residents can request a mail ballot by visiting the clerk’s website atwww.thewillcountyclerk.com; Cook County residents can visit www.cookcountyclerk.com. You can request mail ballots up to five days before Election Day.
County clerks manage voter registration rolls and handle the logistics of collecting and counting ballots. In Will County, Voots’ office has reduced the number of polling places to 303 from a peak of 452 in 2008.
We’re a mortal and mobile society, and clerks have to update voter rolls when people die or move. In Cook County, Clerk David Orr‘s office says it began tapping into the U.S. Post Office’s National Change of Address database last year. Orr says nearly 250,000 voter registrations statewide were automatically updated because of an election reform initiative he lobbied for in 2014.
Orr’s office says in suburban Cook County alone, more than 47,000 voter records have been updated, added or canceled since the new system was adopted. His office is able to report interesting tidbits, like:
“While 206 Orland Park voters just moved within the south suburb, another 125 voters moved into Orland Park from the neighboring towns of Tinley Park (48), Oak Forest (20), Palos Park (17), Oak Lawn (16), Orland Hills (13), and Palos Heights (11).”
Illinois, and Chicago in particular, haven’t had the squeakiest clean reputations when it comes to voting. (The phrase “vote early and vote often” comes to mind.) Historians like to debate whether Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley decided the presidency for John F. Kennedy over Richard Nixon in 1960. The debate tends to focus on whether Illinois’ 27 Electoral College votes made the difference (Kennedy finished with 303 to Nixon’s 219). The legend that Chicago’s Democratic machine committed rampant voter fraud is almost accepted as fact.
That abuse of the public’s trust takes a long time to overcome. But 55 years later, it would seem the clerk’s offices in Cook and Will counties operate with integrity. I refuse to accept concerns about fraud, difficulty registering or inconvenience as reasons not to vote.
If you’re not voting, what’s your excuse?
Summary of Homer District 33C School Board Meeting February 11, 2016
The Board of Education approved revised job descriptions for Custodian, Sec- retary (building level), Clerical Aide and Administrative Assistant for Curriculum and Instruction; revised title and job description for Administrative Assistant to the Superintendent; job description for Homer 33C coaching position.
Kathleen Robinson, Assistant Superintendent for Instruction, presented an update on the District’s five-year Strategic Plan, which was launched at the begin- ning of the 2013-14 school year. The District is on track with its goals, which were established with the help of a committee of parents, teachers, administrators, non- certified staff members and community members as well as feedback from stake- holders. The five strategic goals that are guiding the District, are:
Student Achievement: Provide an effective and instructional program that supports academic success for all students.
Learning Environment: Provide a safe, welcoming and inspirational learning environment that compels and motivates students to participate in their own educa
Professional Environment: Maintain a positive, dynamic work environment in a self-renewing organiza
Partnerships: Build and strengthen productive partnerships among all stakeholders to effectively communicate the District’s ongoing journey.
Resources: Manage and maintain the District’s positive fiscal status while
addressing the District’s strategic priorities.
To aid in the implementation of goals, the District developed eight high-level strategies to serve as a roadmap and timeline for completing objectives. Those eight high-level strategies are:
1. Provide a standards-based curriculum that ensures each child will have the same essential learning opport
2. Provide an aligned system of common formative and summative assessments for each grade level and department to guide instruction in a timely fashion and determine whether expected mastery and growth have occurre
3. Provide directive, timely support within the school day for students who need challenge beyond their required learning and students who are challenged in their learning.
4. Provide a District-wide data system that provides timely, accessible metrics de- scribing the District’s/schools’/classrooms’/students’ achievements, successes and challenges and share results, where suitable, to both internal and external stakeholder
5. Provide time and resources for staff to regularly and frequently meet within the school day around best practices, common data-based results and improving instructional offerings as focused, accountable collaborative tea
6. Provide a safe, welcoming and inspirational school learning environment where students will demonstrate responsibility for their own learning and staff will demonstrate their commitment to and caring of stude
Barb Wilson, President Angela Adolf, Vice President Amy Blank, Secretary
Ed Campins, Member Elizabeth Hitzeman, Member Debra Martin, Member
Russ Petrizzo, Member
Provide structures to engage and feedback mechanisms to elicit the educational aspirations and talents of parents and community members as partners in the Homer 33C educational proces
Ensure that District fiscal, technological and human resources are efficiently utilized to further the District’s strategic priorities while also ensuring long- term fiscal solvency and technological and human resource effectivene
Under each high-level strategy is a list of objectives to complete and a school year in which to complete them. Most of the objectives have been completed. Those remaining include:
Unpacking Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and establishing benchmarks for each grading period as well as District science curriculum pacing guides and aligned curricular mater
Evaluating gifted/talented service delivery and resource
Developing clear technology standards for each grade leve
Developing a Parent Advisory Counc
Toward the end of the five-year strategic plan in 2017-18, Robinson suggests
the District form another committee to establish goals that will guide the District for the next five years.
The Board of Education approved a waiver of facility use fees for Olivet Nazarene University to offer a cohort program at Young School. In exchange, Homer 33C staff will enjoy a 20 percent discount on tuition. Those pursuing doctorates will receive a 10 percent discount. For more information, click hereor visit the district’s website and click on the “Employee Page” tab on the left side of the screen. There, you will find a link to the Olivet Nazarene University informational flyer.
The Board of Education approved Letter s of Intent to Retire from Susan Jagust and Jane Fojtik.
John Reiniche, Assistant Superintendent for Business, presented a report on the District’s Cash Flow and Fund Balances, which are expected to hit a low of $2.7 million in May before rebounding to a projected $18.8 million in June. The report will aid the Board in its conversations about how much cash the Dis- trict should have on hand to meet financial obligations at low points in the tax cycle.
The Next Regular School Board Meeting is February 23, 2016 at 7:30
Northwest Homer Fire Protection District looks to raise tax rate
Elissa Chudwin, Editor
5:47 pm CST February 11, 2016
The Northwest Homer Fire Protection District is seeking an increase to fire service fees during the March 15 general primary election to help pay for building maintenance and new equipment.
The fire district is comprised of two stations — located at 16152 W. 143rd St. and 13010 W. 143rd St. — that serve 10 square miles in Lockport, Homer Glen, Lemont Township and unincorporated Cook County. It is requesting a temporary 9-cent increase to raise the tax rate from .491 percent to .5796 percent for four years.
If the referendum were to pass, a homeowner with a house valued at $100,000 would see an approximate tax increase of $30 per year, according to a Northwest Homer Fire Protection District release.
“We’re hoping it generates [at least] $325,000 over the next four years,” Fire Chief Ken Vrba said.
The fire district is requesting additional revenue to replace overhead garage doors for 15 bays, both stations’ windows, a water tanker and the stations’ generators, according to a Northwest Homer Fire Protection District release. The fire station also needs new roofs, new furnaces at Station One, and new A/C units at both stations within the next five years.
“The roofs were replaced 20 years ago,” Vrba said. “They’ll be due to be replaced soon.”
Deputy Fire Chief Todd Fonfara said the building and equipment’s age is why so much maintenance is needed. The water tanker, which transports water to neighborhoods without fire hydrants, is roughly 33 years old, and many of the parts are no longer manufactured, he said. The estimated cost to replace the tanker is $230,000.
“Now we’re at the point where we can’t do everything else,” Vrba said.
Vrba added several vehicles are also aging and that the fire district has already pushed back their replacement dates.
“We don’t want to provide people with old equipment when we’re taking them to the hospital,” Fonfara said.
While a referendum has not passed since 1980, this is the third time the fire district is attempting to increase fire service fees since 2007, according to Fonfara.
Vrba said the recession impacted the referendum in 2007 and may have prevented it from passing.
“We lost dramatically,” he said. “Unfortunately, there were three other referendums on the ballot … The economy was starting to take a turn. Every ballot in the spring failed.”
Because past referendums have failed, lack of funding left the fire district unable to renovate the building and replace equipment, according to Vrba. The tax rate of the Northwest Fire Protection District also is significantly lower than surrounding areas’ fire districts, he said.
According to a Northwest Homer Fire Protection District document, the Homer Township Fire Protection District, which encompasses 20 square miles, has a tax rate of 1.1093 percent. The Lockport Township Fire Protection District, which serves 42 square miles, has a tax rate of 1.2328 percent. The Lemont Fire Protection District, which covers 40 square miles, has a tax rate of .899 percent.
“We’ve had our numbers very tight,” Vrba said. “We’re half of what Homer Township spends, but we’re accused of being fiscally irresponsible. So that’s not true.”
Firefighters plan to walk door-to-door to advocate for the referendum on Feb. 20, according to Fonfara. The fire district also has posted information on its Facebook page and website at www.nwhomer.org.
– See more at: http://www.lockportlegend.com/northwest-homer-fire-protection-district-looks-raise-tax-rate#sthash.Z0tTAFYZ.dpuf
The Obama Administration is planning to give the Commerce Department control over a new effort to create auniversal Internet ID for every American.
According to CBS, the gig was given to the Commerce Department, as opposed to the NSA, to ease concerns that government intelligence agencies were learning too much about the average citizen. Wait…aren’t the online advertising companies the ones building the most detailed profiles of users? Oh well, moving on.
“We are not talking about a national ID card,” said Commerce Secretary Gary Locke. “We are not talking about a government-controlled system. What we are talking about is enhancing online security and privacy and reducing and perhaps even eliminating the need to memorize a dozen passwords, through creation and use of more trusted digital identities.”
As the recent Gawker hack showed, Locke has a point. It turned out that tons of users were protecting their identity with passwords like “1234567” and “cheese.” Not only was Gawker’s site compromised, but the hack quickly rippled out to other sites like Twitter and LinkedIn, where users employed the same puny passwords. Check Out The 25 Dumbest Gawker Passwords, In Order, Right Here >>
The solution being considered now is a switch to more secure logins, like the OAuth system, which allows users to sign in from their Google or Facebook accounts.
Government ID would likely function in a similar way, an optional profile that users can create which is protected and validated by the government for use logging in to sites or paying for goods online.
Privacy sensitive users uncomfortable with giant corporations or government agencies acting as the arbiter of their online identity may want to get out a pencil now and start writing their passwords down in a very safe place.
Every young adult in Illinois deserves a chance at college. For many, a college degree is the path to breaking out of a cycle of poverty. For others, it’s a badge of honor to build upon the hard work of their parents. And it used to be that if someone couldn’t afford the cost of college, he could work his way through.
But years of massive growth in higher-education bureaucracies and outrageous increases in administrative pay and employee pension benefits have had an incredibly harmful effect.
Lower-income students are now priced out of a college degree. Tuitions have skyrocketed to pay for the administrative bloat and exorbitant salaries, and the costs are falling on taxpayers – and on families and students who are trying to get ahead through higher education.
Now, if low-income students want a college degree, they are forced into crippling debt. More than 1.7 million Illinoisans hold student-loan debt, including 70 percent of the state’s class of 2013 – the fourth-highest rate in the country. Total student-loan debt in Illinois is approaching $50 billion.
In addition to debt, many students are now forced to depend on grants. But for too many would-be students, college is no longer an option.
It’s not surprising to see university and college administrators across Illinois searching desperately for a scapegoat as the state’s budget crisis exposes the mess they’ve created. Instead of admitting their problems are self-inflicted, university officials have settled on blaming the state instead.
Due to the budget gridlock, the state has not appropriated nearly $2 billion in funding for higher education. That’s obviously had an impact on university and college budgets. But higher-education institutions don’t steward this money responsibly to help keep college affordable. Instead, those funds are funneled into skyrocketing administrative costs.
Listening to university officials, however, doesn’t provide the real story. So here it is:
Students are losing access to college because colleges and universities have massively increased tuitions. Combined tuition and fees have grown by over 100 percent at many universities. Even at institutions such as Chicago State University, which serves low-income students, annual tuition and fee costs now equal $11,758, up 77 percent since 2006.
Illinois’ public universities and colleges have forced students and families to pay more and more each year in tuition, whether in the form of cash, federal student loans or state money, then used those funds to hire more and more administrators. Administrative staff increased by 31 percent between 2004 and 2010, while the student and faculty populations each increased by less than 3 percent. Chicago State University has the most administrators per student, by far, of any Illinois university.
Tuition increases have also been used to push executive compensation to exorbitant levels. Over half of Illinois’ 2,465 university administrators received a base salary of $100,000 or more in 2015.
And Illinois’ top higher-education administrators receive additional compensation – housing allowances, cars, club memberships and generous bonuses – that cost colleges and universities millions of dollars each year.
Those big salaries have led to pension benefits that neither Illinois taxpayers – nor students – can afford.
Over 25 percent of university pensioners will receive between $1 million and $2 million in total retirement benefits, while 15 percent will receive more than $2 million in benefits. Early retirement ages – 50 percent of university workers retire in their 50s – and high salaries, coupled with a 3 percent automatic annual benefit boost, allow many university workers to become millionaire pensioners.
That combination of higher salaries and generous pension benefits has put a tremendous strain on the universities’ pension system. The retirement benefits accrued by university workers have grown by 780 percent since 1987, or 8.4 percent yearly.
As a result, the state now appropriates more than 50 percent of its $4.1 billion higher-education budget toward retirement costs. A decade ago, retirement costs made up only 20 percent of the state’s total higher-education spending.
College and university officials and politicians are taking advantage of the budget gridlock to blame the state for their current woes – but all the evidence shows the crisis in higher education is self-inflicted.
Rather than blame the state for their own mistakes, universities and colleges need to reform their spending, with the primary goal of increasing the accessibility of college for all students.
To that end, they must reduce salaries and eliminate administrative bloat – then pass the resulting savings on to students so that all Illinoisans can afford a quality higher education.
The state can also help by fixing the broken university pension system – starting bymoving new university workers onto 401(k)-style plans based on the current SURS self-managed plan program.
In addition, enacting a constitutional amendment allowing Illinois to reform pension benefits for existing workers going forward will go a long way toward fixing the problemswith higher education in Illinois.
The war on cash has gone from overt to covert. Having expended all their ammo with Quantitative Easing to infinity and zero interest rate policy (ZIRP), central banks are now looking toward negative interest rates.
The Obama Administration is planning to give the Commerce Department control over a new effort to create a
