When Wirepoints first dug into the pre-pandemic scores of Decatur 3rd-graders, we thought they’d been misreported. The State Report Card said just 2% of Decatur’s black 3rd-graders could read at grade level. Just 2%?
A Wirepoints analysis of the Internal Revenue Service’s just-released migration data shows Illinois lost, on net, another 101,000 residents to other states in 2020. The state ranked third-worst nationally for net resident losses, both in number of people and per capita.
Gov. JB Pritzker on Friday signed a new bill providing property tax relief for senior, veteran and disabled homeowners. What nobody said is that those reductions for some mean increases for others. It’s just a matter of shuffling the property tax burden.
Senator Tammy Duckworth and Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, both from Illinois, joined with Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren on Thursday to introduce the Price Gouging Prevention Act of 2022.
It’s amazing what nearly $200 billion in federal COVID aid can do to paper over a state’s crumbling finances. Illinois’ state tax revenues are temporarily at record levels, the unpaid bills backlog has been cut and Illinois even saw its credit rating saved from the precipice of junk. Comptroller Susana Mendoza recently called the state’s changed circumstances an “absolutely remarkable turnaround.”
Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul this week urged President Biden to fully cancel federal student loan debt owed by every federal student loan borrower in the country.
It doesn’t matter where you stand on the issues of sex-ed, pronoun usage or transgenderism in school, you should know who’s teaching your kids, what they’re teaching them and whether there’s more than meets the eye.
We recently wrote about how Illinoisans are burdened by the nation’s highest effective property taxes. New research by ATTOM ranked Illinois residential property tax rates as number one in 2021, just ahead of New Jersey.
Traditional media beclowned itself last week at a Chicago conference on “disinformation.” That’s a story in itself, but the bigger story is how they covered up even that story, peddling disinformation about a conference on disinformation. The guilty include Illinois media, which is further guilty of still suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story that is part of what sparked the fireworks at the conference.
The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) last week published a working paper that is the most thorough review we’ve seen so far relating state government COVID policy to actual results. In addition to mortality, it considered effects on the economy and education in its rankings.
We’ve reached a breaking point on crime in Illinois and supermajority Democrats in the state legislature know it. So as June’s primary elections approach, they’ve introduced legislation to create a Crime Reduction Task Force that would “develop and propose ways to reduce crime across the state.” Legislators, law enforcement, policy experts, victims and witnesses would “review research and best practices while taking expert and witness testimony” and then issue findings and recommendations to lawmakers and the Governor by March 1 of next year.
When the U.S. Census Bureau released its state population estimates for 2021 last December, Illinois’ population drop of 114,000 was the second-largest in the country on a percentage basis. Illinois lost nearly 1 percent of its population.
Illinois has earned a reputation as the place people like to leave. Data from the IRS, the Census Bureau, U-Haul and United Van Lines, and most recently from the Allied-Zillow Magnet States study, all show that Illinois is bleeding more people than almost any other state in the country. Practically all of the fresh leakage is due to outmigration driven by high taxes, arrogant governance, and toxic corruption.
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot this week touted a fractional drop in murders and a modest reduction in shooting incidents this year versus the same stretch last year.
One of the greatest sins of our government’s approach to the COVID pandemic has been its oppressive treatment of children. Lockdowns, remote-learning and other mitigation policies have stunted the mental, physical, social and emotional development of children for two years. Research and coverage from NPR, New York Times, the Atlantic and other media increasingly show the damage to children has been enormous, though we won’t know the full impact for decades.
There’s a battle brewing in the Illinois Senate over how much of the state’s remaining $3.5 billion in federal COVID aid should be used to repay the state’s $4.5 billion in unemployment debts. Illinois’ Unemployment Insurance Trust Fund, normally financed by taxes on state businesses, was wiped out after hundreds of thousands of Illinoisans filed unemployment claims as a result of the pandemic lockdowns. The federal government loaned Illinois the $4.5 billion so the state could issue unemployment checks.
