The Heartland Institute

If worries about a European debt contagion aren t enough to keep Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke awake at night, he s starting to worry about a California and Illinois debt contagion. During a Senate Banking Committee hearing July 14, Bernanke said those states unfunded obligations and unpaid bills concern the Federal Reserve ...

Illinois lawmakers have placed a huge bet on gambling to boost the state’s economy. It’s a bet the chairman of the Illinois Gaming Board calls “garbage.” Lawmakers at the end of May passed legislation that covers more than 400 pages and more than triples the amount of casino gambling now allowed in the state. Among other ...

The Wisconsin Supreme Court delivered a resounding humiliation to a state judge by overturning her ruling invalidating restrictions on collective bargaining powers for unionized government workers, said Maureen Martin, senior fellow for legal affairs at The Heartland Institute. Meanwhile, unions have sued in federal court over the ...

March began as February ended in Wisconsin, with thousands of government workers staging sit-ins at the Wisconsin State Capitol building and more than a dozen Democratic state senators on the lam in Illinois, where runaway lawmakers from Indiana later fled. Thousands of teachers have called in sick and shut down school districts ...

New York s new Democrat governor, Andrew Cuomo, has proposed balancing the state s budget with $9 billion of spending cuts from what had been projected, including nearly $3 billion from education, $3 billion from Medicaid, and $1.4 billion from state agency operations. The new budget, which the state is supposed to adopt by ...

Sorry, New York: When it comes to corrupt, irrespons ible, money-grabbing big- government lawmakers, Illinois has got you beat. Your state leaders have never seriously considered a 75 percent income-tax hike plus a 49 percent increase in the corporate tax, as Illinois' General Assembly did this week. When the news broke, citizens ...

The federal government is already spending money to bail out state and local governments. The public just doesn t realize it, because the bailouts are being disguised by transfer payments, subsidized bonds, and shady accounting. This is the thrust of an argument by Meredith Whitney, CEO of Meredith Whitney Advisory Group LLC ...

Sheila Weinberg was not surprised to learn the Securities and Exchange Commission had accused the State of New Jersey of securities fraud. We found New Jersey to be the worst by far of the 50 states when it comes to accounting transparency for liabilities for pension and health insurance benefits for government workers and ...

A Chicago social service agency director desperate to keep his operation going asked Tom Begley for a $75,000 loan. Before Begley could finish due diligence, the agency closed, a victim of the biggest deadbeat in Illinois: the state government. In the two years since then the state has become an even bigger deadbeat. Illinois ...

Colorado lawmakers must again abide by revenue limits in the state s Taxpayer Bill of Rights constitutional amendment. After being suspended for five years, the revenue limits in the state s TABOR went back into effect July 1. Voters passed the TABOR, a constitutional amendment designed to limit government tax revenues and give ...

Spending within one s means might be a quaint notion to many in government these days, but in Indiana state government it s become the standard way of doing business. Gov. Mitch Daniels (R), who took office in 2005, insists on fiscal discipline. One of his chief fiscal disciplinarians is Budget Director Christopher Ruhl. Budget ...

Illinois has a budget deficit projected at $13 billion, an unfunded pension liability of at least $85 billion, and more than $4 billion of unpaid bills to state vendors. It also has a proposal to come to grips with difficult budget truths, if not with the difficult budget problems themselves. It s the Truth in Accounting Act ...

Perhaps no governor this year has done more to encourage supporters of fiscal responsibility and upset supporters of spending as usual than Republican Chris Christie of New Jersey. Standing with Christie is his director of policy, Gregg Edwards. Before joining the Christie administration, Edwards ran the Center for Policy Research ...

Arizona voters on Tuesday overwhelmingly backed a proposal to temporarily raise the state sales tax from a rate of 5.6 percent to 6.6 percent. This amounts to an 18 percent increase in the sales tax rate. State officials project the increase will bring in more than $900 million of additional revenue to the state in its first ...

So it's come to this: The Civic Federation recommends the largest tax increase in Illinois history because financial " doomsday" is upon us." Illinois' financial crisis was not created by the great recession," said Civic Federation president Laurence Msall in announcing his organization's Fiscal Rehabilitation Plan on Monday. " It ...

States had $1 trillion of unfunded liabilities for government workers pensions, healthcare and other retirement benefits at the end of fiscal year 2008, an amount that threatens big tax increases or cuts in government services, according to a report released this week by the Pew Center on the States. The Pew Center determined ...

California began issuing IOUs in July because the state government cannot pay its bills. The IOUs are to mature in October and pay an annualized interest rate of 3.75 percent. Adam Summers, a policy analyst at the Los Angeles-based Reason Foundation, has long followed the fiscal follies in California and offers these thoughts ...

With the Indiana state government enjoying a $1 billion-plus budget surplus while most states are reporting deficits and some are asking the federal government for bailouts and other help, Indiana citizens aren t the only ones taking note of the turnaround in the state under Gov. Mitch Daniels (R) leadership since he took office ...

The Illinois state government owes more than $4 billion in late payments to hospitals, pharmacies, fuel suppliers, and other firms, and the total could reach $5 billion by March, according to State Comptroller Daniel Hynes (D). The situation is extraordinarily bleak, said Senate Minority Leader Christine Radogno (R-Lemont). This ...

Gov. Mitch Daniels (R) of Indiana does not presume to tell other governors or lawmakers what policies they should follow, but he does hope they ll take note of his easy re-election in November. I think my re-election shows there is clearly still a market for fiscal prudence, said Daniels in a recent telephone interview. You ...