One of the few positives in Illinois we’ve been able to cheer over the years has been the state’s flat income tax rate. For years, Illinois was a flat tax state surrounded largely by progressive tax states, including Iowa, Kentucky, Wisconsin and Missouri.
Nearly a year after Illinois lawmakers requested an audit by the Illinois Department of Employment Security of fraudulent unemployment claims and a tabulation of losses during the pandemic, nothing has come forth.
The Illinois Supreme Court on Friday rejected the Pritzker Administration’s request to appeal a lower appellate ruling, thereby effectively ending the statewide school mask mandate. Individual school districts became free across Illinois to decide for themselves on school masks. After the ruling, Pritzker said his mandate will end on Monday, a mandate he has claimed is legal and still effective despite lower court rulings to the contrary.
Illinois’ taxes, corruption, unfriendly business environment and high labor costs continue to take a toll on the state’s economic recovery. And job prospects for many Illinoisans, particularly in the leisure and hospitality industry, have been made even worse by the state’s COVID policies, some of the nation’s strictest.
Gov. J.B. Pritzker recently warned that an Illinois judge's ruling that struck down his school mask mandate for some districts was "out of step" with vast majority of legal analysis in Illinois and the nation.
A comparison of mask-mandated Illinois to its mandate-less neighbors during Omicron shows that Illinois’ restrictions have failed to provide any benefit so far. In fact, a review of publicly-available CDC data shows Illinois’ per capita COVID cases increased more rapidly than all its neighbors, while the state’s deaths per capita are now higher than all of its neighbors except Indiana.
It’s time for public officials like Gov. JB Pritzker to check the political winds on their COVID policies. They may cling to their version of science, but the politics have shifted against them, even within their own party. They are rapidly being left behind, putting Illinois and a few other states in outlier status on COVID policy, particularly for children.
If activists and lawmakers really cared about democracy, they’d drop their unfounded claims of “voter suppression” and instead end what really depresses voter turnout: off-cycle municipal elections.
Illinois is out of step with a majority of the nation when it comes to masking. It’s just one of 11 states with a statewide mask mandate covering either all residents or just the unvaccinated. Thirty-nine states have no statewide mandate at all.
Law professor Jonathan Turley wrote on Thursday condemning how Democratic groups and commentators are seeking to remove as many as 120 Republicans from ballots in the name of democracy. Turley is nationally recognized for his objectivity and impartiality, earning his newsletter, Res Ipsa Loquitur, an astounding 55 million subscribers.
Less than two weeks ago, JB Pritzker’s administration told us we would soon see a “plan” for addressing the gaping hole in Illinois unemployment trust fund. It’s the source of money for unemployment claims but it is underwater by something well over $5 billion. Most of that hole is in the form of the repayment obligation of about $4.5 billion for money borrowed by the trust fund from the federal government during the pandemic.
Many of us in Illinois are snickering, but it’s entirely sensible that “talk is abundant – at least in private,” about Gov. JB Pritzker as a candidate for President of the United States in 2024. That’s what the New York Times reported on Sunday. Check off the boxes on who could win the Democratic primaries for president and you have to put Pritzker at or near the top of the list.
It was only a matter of time.
Left-leaning states, particularly Illinois, have long been trying to strong-arm the financial sector into enforcing their social justice agenda. Now, more conservative states are responding by using the same tool. Nobody will end up winning. Blame those who started it.
Rarely is anything so popular yet so neglected by politicians as school choice for K-12 education. The public has it right on what is a truly righteous cause. For society to honor its fundamental obligation to educate its youth, parents must be offered an alternative to catastrophically failing schools. Society’s future demands it. Simple justice demands it. The state as a place to raise a family demands it. And it is indeed what it has often been called – a civil rights issue.
Illinois just reached an alarming milestone: each Illinois household is now on the hook for, on average, $110,000 in government-worker retirement debts. That figure is the result of dividing Illinois’ $530 billion in state and local retirement shortfalls among the state’s 4.9 million households. In 2019, the burden was $90,000 per household.
“Shooting unarmed citizens is fundamentally wrong,” wrote Gov. JB Pritzker in his statement on the Rittenhouse verdict, which is pasted below. That’s a lie. Pritzker should retract the statement and apologize. One had a pistol pointed at Rittenhouse at the moment Rittenhouse fired, captured in video.
Gov. J.B. Pritzker may be celebrating the lower deficits his budget office just projected for the next five years, but Illinois’ latest “improvements” owe little to what he and the General Assembly have done since the governor took office. To the contrary, most of Pritzker’s recent actions have only served to increase the burden on ordinary Illinoisans going forward. We detail those actions later in this piece.
Unless you want your blood to boil, do not watch the video from last week of supporters of a bill to amend Illinois’ Health Care Right of Conscience Act (HCRCA). Dishonesty, despotism and undisguised ignorance were on full display in a move to assure compliance with vaccine and other COVID mandates.
