I Agree ...
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Chicago Tribune, May 29, 2010
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Chicago Sun-Times, March 2, 2010
I agree. When I was walking door to door in the 51st District, it became quickly apparent that the unemployment rate was higher here than it was elsewhere in the US ... my guess is somewhere around 20 percent of the households I visited had at least one member of the family unemployed. And this isn’t going to change anytime real soon. We must, as a nation, stop focusing on politics and start focusing on solving our problems. Many of the elected officials in Washington and Springfield are highly affluent, and while their individual investments have lost value, they’re not worried about buying groceries for their families.
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Chicago Sun-Times, March 7, 2010
I agree. It’s time for the American voter, not big business, to be influencing the direction of laws and policies. The creators of the US Constitution never envisioned that such incredible sums of money would be used to influence congressional decisions. How can the individual citizen possibly hope to compete with this kind of influence? Are we really being represented?
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Chicago Tribune, April 11, 2010
I agree. This should be a time of tremendous opportunity for leaders who, rather than hiding from recession, exploit it to reinvent Illinois. To radically reshape the state's present and its future. To capitalize on employers' problems in other high-cost states by making Illinois their low-cost place to do business. To grow jobs.
I agree. This recent Chicago Tribune opinion suggested that Illinois could benefit from consolidation of school districts, and while union leaders seemed quick to denounce this idea, it certainly makes good sense from a business perspective, especially in the difficult economic environment we’re living in today. If the article’s commentary about average superintendent salary is correct, the taxpayers of Illinois are spending $130+ million on just those salaries alone. While I certainly appreciate the union’s concern for their members, I think spending money to directly benefit education should be a more important concern. If only 25 percent of the superintendent positions were consolidated, we would have $30+ million more to spend.
Many large corporations faced with staff reductions have offered voluntary incentives to their work force. It’s usually a component of how long you’ve worked for the company and your current age, but I have seen other calculation factors as well. The decisions on how to structure these incentives are a combination of actuarial science and financial calculations and are different for every workforce, but make no mistake ... the “return on investment” of money spent for severance incentives far outweighs carrying the existing costs of these salaries and benefit programs.
Before any school district consolidation should be considered, the same kind of examination needs to take place to their workforce, and incentive programs need to be created if we have any hope of gaining widespread acceptance of plans the state might create. We should also examine offering incentives to the actual school districts with the hope that some of them will consolidate voluntarily. The consolidation of school districts doesn’t necessarily have to happen overnight, and doesn’t mean the immediate reduction in jobs either. I think attempting to force consolidations would only create chaos and not serve the interest of students and taxpayers at all, but I believe we must find some mechanism or incentive to accomplish this as a matter of survival ... cut costs or perish.