How often have you heard from a friend, neighbor, or family member, “as soon as I can, I’m going to move out of Illinois”? Or maybe “my children are going out of state for college and never coming back”?
Illinois has significant financial problems.
Illinois isn’t getting its money’s worth in education spending.
Illinois is losing its employers and its population.
Illinois has gone to the extreme left on many of the so-called “social issues.”
We’re in a hole and we need to stop digging, to right the ship and improve the quality of life for all Illinois citizens.
The fiscal problems
Illinois has a spending problem.
For the 2025-2026 budget approved in May, the state increased its spending by $2 billion from the prior year and bridged the gap between revenue and spending with $500 million in new taxes and $500 million in budget tricks and one-time revenue.
In the state’s budget forecast for the next 5 years, there are projected deficits starting with $3 billion and going up to $5 billion in 2029 and later, with the biggest drivers of the deficits being spending increases for healthcare and human services (welfare, etc.)
Our state’s debt (as of 2023, the latest comparison available) ranked 5th highest on a per-capita basis, at $17,391 per person,
Our state pension funds are the second-worst-funded in the United States. Chicago’s are even worse, but that didn’t stop Pritzker from approving a pension sweetener in June. Back in 2021, Illinois was spending 25% of its tax revenue on pension contributions — now it’s at 20%. Why did it drop? Not because contributions dropped (the numerator) but simply because the state started spending so much money on other things to boost the denominator.
We pay the highest property taxes in the country. There are plenty of reasons for this but one simple cause that should be solvable, but never has been, is the shockingly excessive number of units of local government driving up administrative costs for all the services they provide — 7,000 units in total. Compared by population size, we have 54 units of local government per 100,000 residents, compared to 20 for #2 Texas. You’ve probably noticed the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District on your ballot, with a slate of Democrats and a slate of Republicans, but it usually goes unnoticed that the nine commissioners’ biographies only rarely contain expertise in the field of water reclamation and usually describe political activism instead, for a salary of between $70 – $80,000 per year for a part-time job.
The education failures
How often have you heard that we don’t spend enough on education?
Turns out, we spend a lot. In terms of actual dollars, Illinois ranks 8th, at $21,800 per year. As a share of taxpayer income, Illinois ranks 5th, at 4.5%.
But our test scores are solidly middle-of-the-road, based on the NAEP, the self-titled “nation’s report card.” According to the organization, we are “not significantly different than the National public” for grade 4 math and reading scores. Only in grade 8 scores are we above average, ranking 9th for reading and 16th for math. But even here, all is not well, as the scores appear positive only in comparison to other states. In comparison from year to year scores have declined. In reading, 77% of 8th graders were basic or above, and 36% proficient or better in 2017, but in 2024, only 70% and 33% are. The same is true in math: 68% and 32% were at/above basic and at/above proficient respectively in 2017, and the “basic plus” level dropped down to 62% (only the “proficient in math” percent stayed the same).
Yet what are we doing? Illinois is planning to implement a Comprehensive Numeracy Plan, but its initial materials suggest its focus will be on educational fads like being “equity-driven,” students thinking of themselves “as mathematicians,” implementation of “culturally relevant resources,” and with a hint of de-tracking and eliminating honors classes.
What’s more, the ability of families to escape public schools was curtailed when the Invest in Kids scholarship program was ended, and Governor Pritzker has hinted that he will choose to opt Illinois out of the scholarship opportunity in the “Big Beautiful Bill,” even though there’s no cost to the state. On top of that, Nicolle Grasse was one of the sponsors of a bill, the Homeschool Act, which would have overregulated homeschooling, enabling local school districts to demand “portfolios” and deem a homeschooled child truant by claiming the portfolio was insufficient.
Employer and population losses
It’s no secret that our population is declining as middle-class Illinoisans flee to places like Florida and Texas. Our state’s population dropped by 2% from its peak in 2013 to 2022. We are up slightly since then only because of the arrival of migrants.
And this means our job growth is paltry, too. From January 2019 (when Pritzker took office) to July 2025 (the most recent data), private sector jobs increased by 18,400. That’s a fraction of the new jobs in Florida, at 1.1 million, or Texas, at 1.5 million!
Another measure of how turned around Illinois is, is that the increase in government jobs was double that of private sector jobs – when it’s only a fraction of the increase, in Florida and Texas!
But what’s the state’s solution? Special subsidies for favored industries, like the $827 million promised to Rivian and the $536 million promised to Gotion. And treating cannabis as a growth industry, celebrating its increasing use, rather than its original promise of legalization as harm reduction.
Social-issue Failures and Extremism
Despite promises that the SAF-T Act implementation of no-cash bail would involve assessment of an arrestee’s risk to the community, it’s a regular occurrence in Illinois that suspects are arrested for robbery, rape, and even murder while on pre-trial release for other crimes (with surely far more instances than what’s reported and identified by AI). And when comparing America’s three largest cities, Chicago’s homicide rate is three times as great as Los Angeles and nearly five times as large as New York City’s, even though in the early 1990s, those rates were nearly the same.
In Illinois, boys who identify as girls are expressly permitted in girls’ changing rooms and on girls’ sports teams. What’s more, not only are puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones permitted by law but the law mandates that insurance companies cover these without a copay.
In Illinois, not only is there is effectively no restriction on abortion but insurance plans are obliged to pay for it without a copay. What’s more, the state’s Medicaid plans pay providers at one of the highest reimbursement rates in the country and a rate that’s quadrupled (for D&C) since 2017 and increased by a factor of 10 for second term abortions.
But wait, there’s more!
I’ll regularly provide more details on important issues for the northwest suburbs and Illinois in the “blog” section. And you can count on me to share the data and the facts, not spin, though some information may become outdated as laws change or statistics are updated.
