Social Issues

To our complete 'shock', the liberal bastion of California's northern shores has just announced that it will create a brand new branch of the Public Defender's office to specifically defend illegal immigrants in deportation cases.  Adding insult to injury, taxpayers will have to pony up an additional $200,000 each year to cover the cost of 3 public defenders and a paralegal, all of whom will be dedicated to making sure that federal laws are ignored.

A new report from the Hoover Institution written by Senior Fellow Joshua Rauh and entitled "Hidden Debt, Hidden Deficits: How Pension Promises Are Consuming State And Local Budgets," does a masterful job illustrating the true severity of America's public pension crisis, a topic to which we've dedicated a substantial amount of time over the past couple of years. 

Submitted by Michael Lucci via IllinoisPolicy.org,

New Bureau of Labor Statistics data show Illinois’ black residents have an unemployment rate of 12.7 percent, more than double the state’s overall rate.

The CBO has finally scored the House-passed healthcare bill, H.R.1628 (which as a reminder remains DOA in the Senate), and finds modest improvement relative to its last scoring of the proposed Healthcare bill as of March 23. Here are the apples to apples comparisons with the last proposed version of the bill:

President Trump's fiscal 2018 budget proposal would completely eliminate 66 federal programs, for a savings of $26.7 billion. 

http://launch.newsinc.com/

As The Hill reports, some of the programs would receive funding for 2018 as part of a phasing-out plan.

Here are the programs the administration wants on the chopping block...

Agriculture Department — $855 million