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Persistent problems have left Illinois the butt of jokes and threatened it with fiscal catastrophe. In Fixing Illinois, James D. Nowlan and J. Thomas Johnson use their four decades of experience as public servants, Springfield veterans, and government observers to present a comprehensive program of almost one hundred specific policy ideas aimed at rescuing the state from its long list of problems. Nowlan and Johnson start with the history of how one of the most prosperous states of the 1950s became a present-day mess riven by debt and discord and increasingly abandoned by both businesses and citizens. Among their more than ninety proposals to restore Illinois to greatness: • An overhaul of state pension systems that includes more reasonable benefits and lengthening of the retirement age, among other changes; • Reducing one of the nation's highest corporate tax rates to attract business; • Medicare reform through an insurance voucher program; • Demanding that schools raise expectations for success, particularly in rural and impoverished urban areas; • A new approach to higher education that includes a market-driven system that puts funds in the hands of students rather than institutions; • Broadening of the tax base to include services and reduction in rates; • The creation of a long-term plan to maintain the state's five-star transportation infrastructure; • Raising funds with capital construction bonds to update and integrate the antiquated information systems used by state agencies; • Uprooting the state's entrenched culture of corruption via public financing of elections, redistricting reform, and revolving door prohibitions for lawmakers. Pointed, honest, and pragmatic, Fixing Illinois is a plan for effective and honest government that seeks an even nobler end: restoring our faith in Illinois's institutions and reviving a sense of citizenship and state pride.
Blends interpretive essays with primary source documents (diaries, letters, travelogues, official documents and messages, newspaper reports, oral interviews) to provide a firsthand, widely varying, and distinctly human portrait of events and trends that shaped the lives of everyday Americans. Covers Father Marquette's accounts to pioneer life, to the Lincoln-Douglas debates, the "Gilded Age", the prohibition era, the Great Depression, and the period of 1951-1976 in Chicago.
American civilization has been shaped by four decisive forces: the frontier, migration, sectionalism, and federalism. The frontier has offered abundance to those who would/could take advantage of its opportunities, stimulated technological innovation, and been the source of continuous change in social structure and economic organization; migration has been responsible for relocating cultures from the Old world to the New; various sections of geographic territories have adjusted to the overall American culture without losing their individual distinctiveness; and federalism has shaped the United States' political and social organization. The Metropolitan Frontier and American Politics was begun in the late 1950s under the auspices of the University of Illinois Institute of Government and Public Affairs as a study of the eight "lesser" metropolitan areas in Illinois. What started out as a design for "community maps" of each area, with the intent to outline their particular political systems, led to a major study of metropolitan cities of the prairie--the "heartland" area between the Great Lakes and the Continental Divide--with an examination of the processes that have shaped American politics. The distinctive features of geographic areas that Elazar discovered can be understood as reflections of the differences in cultural backgrounds of their respective settlers. Understanding these communities requires an examination of their place in the federal system, the impact of frontier and section upon them, and a study of the cultures that inform them as civil communities. The volume is consequently divided into three parts: "Cities, Frontiers, and Sections," "Streams of Migration and Political Culture," and "Cities, States, and Nation," each of which explores Elazar's concerns in discovering the interrelationship between the cities of the frontier and American politics. A prequel to The Closing of the Metropolitan Frontier (published by Transaction in 2002), The Metropolitan Frontier and American Politics will be of great interest to students of politics, American history, and ethnography.