Gov. Pritzker’s 2025 budget address and the kitchen table issues that actually matter – Wirepoints

By: Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner

It’s become nearly meaningless to opine on the details of Illinois’ annual budgets. For more than 20 straight years, Illinois governors have claimed their budgets were “balanced.”* That they were fixing Illinois’ structural problems…like Gov. Jim Edgar with his pension ramp, Gov. Pat Quinn with his “temporary” tax hike or Gov. J.B. Pritzker and his unpaid bill paydown.

And yet year after year, Illinoisans are on the hook for more debts, taxes go up and people continue to flee the state. Illinois’ budgets don’t work. They are dishonest. The only real way to really judge a budget, then, is to measure how it impacts the kitchen table issues of ordinary Illinoisans. Like gasoline prices. And property taxes. The quality of education. Inflation. And of course, jobs. 

By that standard, Gov. Pritzker’s previous five budgets have failed and his latest proposal for 2025 is on track to do the same. The data is unequivocal, as we detail in the sections below.

Three points before we make our case:

• Illinois’ failed budgets existed long before Gov. Pritzker’s. We’ve criticized Governors Rauner, Quinn, Blagojevich and Edgar for many of the same issues. But Pritzker has been governor for five years now and he’s got an easily measurable record.
• In 2019, political mismanagement brought Illinois to the fiscal brink and Moody’s even threatened a junk rating for the state. Gov. Pritzker’s budgets are special in that they were bailed out by the unprecedented $200 billion in federal covid dollars given to the state’s public and private sectors. The paydown of the state’s unpaid bills, the restoration of a rainy day fund and the credit rating upgrades were all due to the windfall tax revenues created by the federal largesse, facts the governor refuses to acknowledge.
• Illinoisans may be confused into thinking that many items in the 2025 budget tackle kitchen table issues. There’s the elimination of the grocery tax, the child tax credit and the pre-K education expansion. But on the whole, they don’t. That’s because the cumulative impact of more programs and more spending just results in more tax hikes, more bureaucracy and the dysfunction that Illinois is known for. The costs outweigh the benefits.

Here’s how Gov. Pritzker’s budgets fail to address the kitchen-table issues Illinoisans care about:

1. Illinois’ jobs climate still one of the nation’s worst

Kitchen table issue number one for most people is jobs. In his budget speech, the governor highlighted the jobs created by a few favored industries, but overall his budgets have failed to put Illinoisans back to work. Illinois’ unemployment rate remains the nation’s 3rd-highest and the number of Illinoisans employed fell by 16,500 in 2023. 

And compared to when the governor first took office in 2019, employment in Illinois today is down by more than 120,000 people – the nation’s 2nd-biggest loss. Illinois had 6,277,328 people employed in Jan. 2019, falling to 6,155,725 by Dec. 2023.

2. No relief from nation’s 2nd-highest property taxes

Property taxes are perhaps the single most painful part of living in Illinois. Residents pay the nation’s 2nd-highest tax rate and have done so for years. Gov. Pritzker acknowledged that pain and promised in his 2020 budget address that a property tax task force would deliver relief. That task force ended up failing and the governor hasn’t mentioned property tax relief since.

The 2025 budget marks the fourth year in a row the governor has failed to deliver on his original promise of property tax relief.

Pain for homeowners continues to grow across the state, most recently in Cook County. Many residents in the Northwest suburbs, for example, just saw their bills skyrocket by 25% to 30%. And in Chicago, immigrant neighborhoods like Pilsen and Little Village have also been shocked by unaffordable property tax hikes.

3. No relief from nation’s 2nd-highest gas taxes

The pain Illinoisans feel at the pump is real. Residents pay the 2nd-highest gas prices east of the Rocky Mountains – a fact with huge implications for family budgets. Yet the 2025 budget delivers no gas tax relief. 

Illinoisans’ high costs are due largely to Gov. Pritzker’s doubling of the state’s motor fuel tax hike in 2019. That drove up Illinois’ gas taxes to the nation’s 2nd-highest – up from 21st-highest before the hike. And because of the new law’s annual, automatic adjustment for inflation, the gas tax will continue to grow higher year after year.

4. Driving up inflation

Gov. Pritzker’s proposal to eliminate the one percent sales tax on groceries is real relief for Illinois families, even if small. But it won’t make up for the record inflation that’s bitten into Illinoisans’ wallets over the past several years – inflation created by the massive federal spending and covid bailouts that Gov. Pritzker and other state leaders championed.

Senate President Don Harmon made Illinois the first state in the nation to beg for federal money back in 2020. It triggered this New York Times headline: “Illinois Seeks a Bailout From Congress for Pensions and Cities.” And Governor Pritzker warned several times that the state required federal largesse to continue operating:

From WBEZ Chicago: “There’s no chance we won’t have to suffer severe, damaging cuts to higher education, to K-12 education, to basic services that people need if we don’t get any support,” the governor said. “That’s what’s going to happen to our state. We’re going to see just an enormous hole where we’ve made so much progress.”

From the Chicago Tribune: Gov. J.B. Pritzker warned that the state faces ‘extraordinarily painful’ budget cuts if the federal government fails to provide states with relief funding to make up for tax revenue shortfalls caused by efforts to deal with the coronavirus pandemic.”

Their begging helped create a windfall for Illinois. The state’s public and private sectors ended up receiving $200 billion out of the trillions the federal government spent on covid relief.

Illinoisans have suffered the inflationary impact of all that spending. The price of ground beef has risen 29% since January of 2020. Chicken is up 41%. Coffee, up nearly 50%. Eggs, up 73%. 

Ending the 1% grocery tax doesn’t even make a dent in that. Especially since Illinoisans will be hit with more spending-related inflation if Gov. Pritzker has his way. He’s calling for even more federal support (i.e. spending) for the illegal immigration crisis.

5. Education: more spending, worse outcomes

Children unable to do their homework because they can’t read properly is literally a kitchen-table issue. K-12 education is a prime example of how major increases in programmatic spending don’t translate into better outcomes for Illinoisans.

Gov. Pritzker and his supermajority allies have cumulatively poured $7 billion in additional funding into public schools since he took office and yet the share of students able to read or do math at grade level remains dismally low. In 2019, 37.4% of students could read at grade level and just 32% could do math at grade level. In 2023, the results were even lower.

The real question

The question Illinoisans should ask themselves is, “am I better off under Gov. Pritzker’s budgets?” 

The above facts show the answer is no. 

Appendix

*With exception of the budget impasse years under Gov. Rauner.

Read more from Wirepoints:

• City Club of Chicago plays host to education officials’ latest excuse for dismal student outcomes: The covid pandemic
• How Illinois’ political machine gets billions in school bond referendums passed
• Chicago criminals out on probation/parole/pretrial release continue violence in 2024
• Education fail: Not a single child tested proficient in math in 67 Illinois schools. For reading, it’s 32 schools.