You’ll find dozens of articles online today, for Illinois and nationally, about issues surrounding deductibility of prepaid of property taxes. You may even find one for your particular county. I can’t begin to attempt to summarize them because there’s so much contradiction and inconsistency. For Illinois, it’s yet another chapter in our miserable property tax system. Inconsistencies abound across Illinois counties and — at least for now — it looks like unfairly disparate results may be dictated by what county your property is in. For Cook County, we wrote earlier that it appeared second half 2017 taxes (ordinarily payable in

Check out the great display of state population trends in the Washington Post article linked here. It makes the point that the big population losers have been two states heavily dependent on coal — Wyoming and West Virginia — but it sure paints the picture nicely about Illinois. Except for those two coal states, Illinois is the biggest loser, both in the most recent year and since the 1980s. (But don’t blame Illinois’ current problems on the loss of coal jobs. The industry hasn’t employed more than 5,700 people in over 20 years and it lost only about 2,000 jobs