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Illinois has had online filing for free for quite some time. Despite the website being "outdated" (I call it a clean design), it works quite well. It's saved me quite a bit of money over the years.

I too live in Chicago (well, the suburbs). Hopefully their urban planning will make it easier to live without a car:

http://www.cmap.illinois.gov/2040/main

His point is that if we stop spending so much money on wars in far away lands and put that money into out school systems, our own people and nation will be much better off in the long run.

I have to concur with this view
All our national wealth is spent on military industrial complex while the nation is slipping away into 3rd world status.

Fist of all, we do not have the money we are using to fight the wars. It would be impossible to spend it on education unless we are going to continue to spend money we don't have. Until recently, the wars have been funded off budget which stops congress from just re-spending the money after the war doesn't need it. It's hard to say what will happen when the war is over but it appears that trillion dollar deficits aren't all that startling any more. Eventually this deficit spending will backfire then all of the tax revenue is used for paying our debts instead of financing the programs we shouldn't be having in the first place.

Second, the money for wars is spend at a federal level, the states are primarily responsible for their school funding so nothing is stopping the state from raising taxes and spending more. Certainly the federal taxes haven't been raised to account for the war spending outside of tax cuts being stopped. What the mayor is really asking for is money from outside the state because his own constituents do not agree with his logic.

Finally, the amount of money we are talking about is a misnomer. It's actually less then $1 per student per year increase in funding. There are 52,935,996 school aged children from 5-17 years of age as estimated in 2008. Now this estimate doesn't include students starting school before age 5 or students over 18 in school. It also doesn't guarantee all of the population referenced is in school but it's a decent place to start. Anyways, it works out to just over $3,000 per kid if you divert all funding from Iraq and Afghanistan to the schools but do not count the fact that members of the military are normally stationed elsewhere so part of that funding is going to not be accessible. Currently, there are about 2,284,856 student aged children in Illinois (same source). So an increase of $6,854,568,000 would be seen if that money was diverted. Illinois already spends something like $51.6 trillion dollars (as of 2008) per year, that would be around a 13% increase in spending but why should it come from the feds and not the citizens of Illinois? It's not like the feds are already taking it, hell- it's already not paid for.

Illinois is currently fighting a 13 billion dollar budget deficit because they failed to do proper spending and federal government requirements for program mandates. Do you really think that 6 billion would go to the students? Even if you passed a law mandating it would, they would just pull other funding from the schools to make a run about look legal. It's happened many times before and happens in almost any state when they receive federal funding.

The majority of Americans are morons that still believe Saddam was behind 9/11. Education can fix this ..

I believe this too. However, I do not limit my beliefs to 9/11 issues.

We need to redirect our priorities sooner than later. The longer we continue to dick around not dealing with our social problems, the worse things will become. Improving our school system is a great place to begin

I think the problem is sort of like you not seeing the forest for the trees. The problem is actually dicking around with social problems in the first place. The federal government shouldn't be involve in most of them and the state should delegate most of the issues down stream to localities within their control so that the money or programs are more effective.

Illinois state law requires that disks be overwritten ten times before they may be scrapped (see Here for the law). Last year the Governor entered into a no-bid contract with a firm to scrub drives (also refurbish and sell) used electronics after a report found that almost no drives were being overwritten by many state agencies. See this pdf for more details.

All computer inventory must be sent back to the state where drives are be wiped clean (this must be done, and there is a fee for it). Then the computers are often auctioned off by Illinois Centeral Managment services ...

see http://www.cms.illinois.gov/cms/1_buying/

-AC

Sometime these things may end up here:

https://ibid.illinois.gov/secure/default.aspx

Me again. Um, yeah, you should spend a little time on your state government's website before asking Slashdot.

Buying from Illinois - Purchasing State Surplus Property

http://www.illinois.gov/teledirectory/listagency.c fm?agencycd=416

This isn't going to happen, neither ICANN or the current DNS would ever recover from a scandal like this. Let's just forward all our spam to Governor Blagojevich.

Illinois = Illinois. Their Website : http://www.illinois.gov/

If the government spent half as much time getting guns off the street and making weapons unavailable to kids then half our problems would be solved right there.

Interestingly, if you google 'Rod Blagojevich' the first site is ilinois.gov and the top story at that site is about the creation of anti-gun-smuggling police units, which occurred several days before this videogame law. They've got their priorities straight, but the threshold at which lower priority items get made into legislation or not needs to be raised.

The release states that the two proposed bills (one for violence, one for sex) will ban "the distribution, sale, rental and availability of violent video games to children younger than 18" [emphasis mine]. Are they going to charge parents who don't keep their "M"-rated games in locked gun-cabinet-style safes with making these games available to minors?