In the all important “Jobs Bowl”, far more important than the “Super Bowl” Illinois is losing out to Texas and Indiana. Via email from the Illinois Policy Institute: “The common refrain made against Texas by those who defend the status quo in Illinois is that the jobs being created in the Lone Star State are lower-paying...

Here are links to the top stories available online over the past week reporting on union activity including legislation, financial impact, reform activism, etc., from California and across the USA. Political targeting of Walker supporters proves it can happen here By Rick Manning, February 11, 2014, 2014 It can’t happen here. Government targeting and intimidation...

Los Angeles Times op-ed and teachers union defense of educational status quo are packed with malarkey. Now in its third week, the Students Matter trial still has a ways to go. Initially scheduled to last four weeks, the proceedings are set to run longer. On Friday, Prosecutor Marcellus McRae told Judge Rolf Treu that the...

A new union-sponsored study lowballs today’s pension costs by around two-thirds and overstates the net costs of corporate welfare. The Washington Post’s Lydia DePillis recently reported on a new union-sponsored study from Good Jobs First that claims that corporate welfare payments from state governments dwarf the costs of public employee pensions. To begin, we shouldn’t take this corporate welfare/public...

It’s a common notion nowadays that American blue-collar workers are doomed to live out their lives on the low-paid margins of the economy. They’ve been described as “bitter,” psychologically scarred and even an “endangered species.” Americans, noted one economist, suffered a “recession” but those with blue collars endured a “depression.” Yet in recent years, according to research by...

Government employee union leaders are grinning from ear to ear. Governor Brown wants to hire an additional 1,600 employees and jettison some state contracts with private sector workers. It’s been said that all government work should be subjected to the “Yellow Pages test.” If a service provider can be found in the phone book —...

Authorized by Lyndon Johnson in 1965 as the Higher Education Act to guarantee low-income minorities have the same opportunity for a college education as children in middle-class families, the program was renamed for Senator Claiborne Pell in 1980. Like most well-intentioned government programs, the projected costs for the new entitlement exploded and exceeded the funds...