Poverty In Illinois

A press release reported today that 1.5 million people in Illinois and indicated that poverty rates have increased in 87 of the 100 counties in the states and that the problem isn’t just a urban one, but also a rural problem. What it also should show is the failure of the Blagojevichs administrations policies and the damage that they have done to the states economy.
In the long run there are only two ways that poverty can be eliminated, thou education and strong economic growth. With strong economic growth, you can have all the government policies and intervention that you want, but they are doomed to fail and maybe even make the situation worse. But first education, the state needs to improve it education to insure that all student have the best education oppurnties possible. School districts need to be held accountable not just for students performance, but also for how they spend there funds. The single largest increases in the cost of schooling have not come in the form of education cost or teachers salaries, but from support staff, administration and non-education staff. Those cost need to be reigned and more of the money that is used to pay for them directed toward education or teachers. The majority of funding should still come from the local community, but state funding should be tied to each student and the state should, at least, experiment with a voucher system. This should be designed to allow student from failing schools to attend more successful ones, either private of public. If that is successful move to a full voucher system for all students, this would inject a level of competition into the school system and add yet another check on how schools decided to use there funds. None of this means that we should abandoned the public schools of course, they should remain properly funded and we should look for local solution in order to solve local problems when ever possible. Since one size fits all programs, like the utter failure that is No Child Left Behind, can not possible solve the problems of school districts that have different features and problems. Also many of the rural school districts that have small population will have to look at consolidating with other districts, quite frankly the state still has many districts that are to small to offer there student the kind of education that they need and deserve in order to make a good living. Schools need to add more vocation training programs for students that are no college bound or unlikely to be able to succeed in college level programs.
Some communities will have to change there cultural so that is more supporting or education and parent will have to be willing to be more involved in with there children’s education. Parental involvement is one of the most important factors when it comes to children’s success in school, and it is one of the reasons that students in private schools tend to do better on average, is that their parents are more involved in their education. For people that are already out of school and in the work force we need to expand job training and vocation education programs. The community college system provided the perfect infrastructure for this, along with providing an affordable 2 year college education for students that plan to either transfer to a 4 year college/university or just get their associates degrees, one of the major mission of the community colleges should be to serve as a center to retrain the part of the local work force that are in low income jobs or have lost there jobs for new more profitable careers.

Economic growth is probably the most important factor in lessening the number of people living in poverty, a rising tide lifts all boats and growing economy increases everyone standard of living. Which means the state of Illinois needs to adopted good economic policies that promote growth. We need to repeal the fee increases that the governor has put into place on business in the state of Illinois. This increases in fees have the effect of both making Illinois a less attractive place for business to set up in or encourages them to relocate in near by states and in lower the profits of companies in the state which in turns means that they have less money to expanded and hire new works. We also need to keep the state's minimum wage at the same level as neighboring states, when our minimum wage is higher than neighboring states, it encourage companies that rely heavily on low skilled labor to locate in those state instead of Illinois, this in turn means fewer jobs for the low skilled worker in Illinois, who happen to be the most likely section of society to be poor and if they don’t have a access to work it means that they will be poor for sure. The State also needs to control spending on unnecessary programs in order to balance the State budget and then we need to devote an surplus to two things, one education funding and two improving the state infrastructure and capital improvement projects. This will make the state even more attractive to business and encourage strong economic growth.
In the short run the state should help the poor not be raising the minimum wage, which will mean higher prices and more unemployment for the poorest section of society, but expanding the State Earned Income Tax Credit into a full negative income tax, so that no only will poor workers get to keep all of their pay, but they will also receive a check in the form of the negative income tax. This will do a lot more to help than a minimum wage increase and will not have as many negative affects on the states economy.