What Has The Government Ever Done for Us?

It may be hard to believe — given the feckless standoff that the Illinois General Assembly is currently mired in with intransigent ideologue Governor Bruce Rauner — but the Illinois General Assembly has a history of taking bold action to solve big problems. Case in point: the reversing of the Chicago River. In the late 1800s, Chicago, with a population

People over 50 remember the air pollution. I remember it. You could see it. You could smell it. You could even taste it. I remember riding in the back of a Ford Gran Torino station wagon on the Indiana Toll Road through the steel town of Gary, Indiana, in 1976. You could almost smell the town before you could see

This guest post was contributed by Phil Kadner, an award-winning Chicago journalist. It was socialism, no doubt about it. The U.S. government created its own power company, purchased private utility companies, built dams, and brought electricity for the first time to rural areas. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) was created in 1933 as part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Donald Trump has often called the Affordable Care Act, which was passed in 2010 and is more commonly known as Obamacare, a “disaster.” Sometimes even a “total disaster.” During Barack Obama’s administration, the House of Representatives voted to repeal the ACA more than 50 times, but Obama, of course, never signed the repeal into law. Since January, the Republicans have controlled

The guest post was contributed by Tim Callahan The preamble to the Constitution explicitly states five goals for establishing the Constitution of the United States: to “form a more perfect Union” to “establish Justice” to “insure domestic Tranquility” to “provide for the common defense” to “promote the general Welfare” Social Security accomplishes at least one of these goals: promoting the

This guest post was contributed by Phil Kadner, an award-winning Chicago journalist. By the thousands American parents volunteered their children in what would eventually be called the country’s first national vaccination campaign. In 1954, in the largest field trial ever attempted, more than 600,000 school children stuck their arms out to be injected. About 400,000 would get Dr. Jonas Salk’s