Is This How You Want To Spend $856 Million?

Why you’re working your you-know-what off to support your family, here’s what other people are doing. 

Roughly 117,000 Americans double-dipped by cashing unemployment and Social Security disability checks during the height of the jobs crisis, costing taxpayers a combined $856 million in fiscal 2010 according to a government watchdog agency. The additional strain on the system will make the SSDI trust fund insolvent in four short years. With most eyes fixed on the election battle between President Obama and Republican Mitt Romney, it was easy to miss the alarming report by the Government Accountability Office that was initially released this summer.

Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Ok., announced at the end of last month, “This report shows that Congress has failed to hold agencies accountable.” The lawmaker has yet to outline legislation for greater oversight, but on Wednesday afternoon he will discuss the results of an 18-month investigation into the approval process for Social Security Disability Insurance. 

“It is not some far right, extremist cause”

Cardinal Timothy Dolan continues to speak out against those who attack religious freedom. Thank you, Cardinal Dolan.

Addressing a largely Catholic audience Monday night at an event sponsored by the John Carroll Society in Washington, D.C., Cardinal Timothy Dolan emphasized the non-sectarian, non-partisan—catholic with a small “c”—nature of the fight for religious liberty.  “It is not some far right, extremist cause,” Dolan said, but an “American human rights issue.”

Duke Survey: CFOs Less Optimistic Today Than Three Months Ago

Another bad sign for our economy. From the Triangle Business Journal:

Chief financial officers are less optimistic than they were three months ago, according to a Duke University survey that asked about the global economy and the respective companies’ own prospects.

An optimism index from the Global Business Outlook survey fell to 52 on a scale from 0 to 100, down from 56 in June and 59 in March. Duke’s Fuqua School of Business and CFO magazine survey 1,500 CFOs around the world quarterly.

Economic policies have consequences.

Accountability For Teachers

If you haven’t been following the Chicago teacher strike, you may not realize that in addition to the usual labor union demands — more money, more benefits — the issue of teacher  accountability for student achievement is in play. 

“This strike brings to the surface a tension that has been brewing in the Democratic Party for the last few years between the old guard of teachers unions and a generation of hard-charging education reformers,” says Michael McShane, an education policy fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

This is going to be fascinating.

For information on education reform in North Carolina, visit here.