In Illinois such wastefulness is normal, going largely unnoticed and unpoliced, because our state has an absurdly large number of local government entities, some 7,000. That’s the most in the United States. Illinois would be more taxpayer-friendly if hundreds of unnecessary units of government were given the ax, as reformers have been pushing for years.

An income tax hike to 5 percent makes a call for a progressive tax system during the 2018 gubernatorial race a much easier sell.

Jobe said 110 million domestic visitors were recorded in Illinois in 2016, up by one million from 2015. That resulted in about $2.6 billion tourism dollars. an increase of $105 million over the year directly related to tourism, and 20,000 new tourism jobs over the last two years.

Only 25 percent of graduating seniors in 2016 showed college readiness in all four core subjects on the ACT,” ISBE says. “That’s English, math, reading, and science.”

“On Memorial Day, something I can only describe as surreal happened. On the House floor, Rep. Lou Lang, D-Skokie, actually acknowledged one of the state’s many problems….”

The report is the latest study to calculate the impact of aging populations on the pension gap in the world’s six largest markets, which include the United States, United Kingdom, Japan, Netherlands, Canada and Australia.

From The Bondy Buyer’s Yvette Shields: Illinois officials told a federal judge last week that moving payments to Medicaid providers and insurers up the payment chain could endanger other state priority payments like debt service.

Illinois was ranked the third-worst state in the country for legal fairness, according to a report from the respected Harris Poll company, and our state is home to three of the worst “Judicial Hellholes” in the country, as ranked by the American Tort Reform Association.

Golf is a struggling business in Illinois. But Wisconsin “is now the new mecca of golf. With the U.S. Open, it’s arrived in the big time.”