Republicans, however, are arguing that the entire issue of prescription drug costs is beyond the scope of state government, and that some of the Democrats’ proposals could actually end up costing taxpayers and making life-saving medications less available to people in the state.

Comment: We will have our own critique of that paper up soon.

All but two states—Illinois and West Virginia—gained residents over the past decade, even as population growth nationally continued to slow.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker claims his progressive income tax will only affect the rich. But Illinoisans making as little as $26,100 would see an income tax hike under rates Pritzker cited in his budget address.

The struggles of Elmira and Danville exemplify the plight of fading factory towns in rural areas that are losing population and can’t rely on other economic pillars to cushion the blow.

Pritzker’s budget avoids all the hard fiscal choices that the state must make.

By a pension actuary.

Comment: We have not yet gotten a full understanding of the net impact of this new $390 million tax on MCOs proposed by Pritzker. That’s because, allegedly, much of it comes back in the form of federal reimbursements.

Comments: It’s time for proponents of the progressive tax panacea to put up or shut up.

Trump noted that there were 17 new governors at the event in the State Dining Room. “Very smart ones, like my friend,” Trump said, turning to Pritzker, who has frequently criticized the president.

“Congratulations. It’s a great — you’re going to have — you have such an easy state. That’s so easy. Great state of Illinois. What an easy state. I don’t know. Huh? Have you found it to be easier or tougher than you thought?”

“Well, you’re going to help us out,” Pritzker responded, drawing a laugh from his fellow chief executives.

“I’ll help you out. I help everybody

Comment: Preckwinkle’s story is that it wasn’t her crooked husband who held the fundraiser for me, it was her, an IL Supreme Court Justice, who is prohibited from doing so. And Preckwinkle had 34 meetings with Justice Burke over the last four years.

Comment: Wow, something from the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability that we think is pretty good! The questions asked, that is, are good ones. However, there’s a more fundamental problem with asset transfers in plain sight, which is they do not improve the state’s overall position. See our own article on this linked here.

Comment: Governor Pritzker has ruled this out for now, but this is otherwise a good article on the background and what other states do.

“Judging by the fiscal 2020 state budget just unveiled, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that we have managed to elect ourselves a governor who is, despite his vast wealth, indebted to a very powerful interest group indeed.”

By Greg Baise chairman of Ideas Illinois, a pro-job-creation political committee.

The residents of most U.S. states are more likely to identify as conservative than as liberal in their political ideology. In 25 states, the conservative advantage is significantly greater than the national average, including 19 “highly conservative” states in which conservatives outnumber liberals by at least 20 percentage points. Meanwhile, in six states, there are more liberals than conservatives.

Comment: Decades overdue. Asset seizures are fundamentally Un-American.

Comment: That didn’t take long. As it becomes evident that Pritzker can’t make the numbers work, count on this being a central message from him — it’s Trump’s fault.

New Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s plan? Refinance the pension debt and tax plastic bags, marijuana and sports betting, which will supposedly cover the shortfall until voters approve a referendum next year replacing the state’s flat 4.95% income tax with a progressive tax. Mr. Pritzker says a progressive tax will spare the middle class, though there may be a reason he hasn’t proposed a specific higher rate.

Research outfit Wirepoints calculates that the top rate would have to rise to 11.2% on millionaires and at least 8.5% on everyone earning more than $50,000 to finance Mr. Pritzker’s spending proposals. The progressive model

Comment: But he still won’t put up any projected revenue or the rates he would support. Why? Because his panacea would be exposed as a myth.

Although Illinois is on a path to a statewide $15 an hour minimum wage, some state lawmakers want to raise pay for publicly-funded home care providers for the disabled to more than $20 an hour.

Federal Signal, like other businesses, has struggled to fill vacancies at some locations. But in Illinois, the company still receives five or six applications from qualified candidates for every opening. “It came down to the quality of the workforce,” the CEO said.

Comment: This academic white paper is truly among the most irresponsible and foolish things we’ve seen yet on Illinois pensions. We’ll write up some thoughts on it soon.

Comment. This can’t be repeated often enough. “Budgets are basically forward-looking rhetorical devices.” Pritzker’s new budget, like all budgets in Illinois, means little. Actual results will once again show Illinois sinking billions further into the red.

Shush. They’ll up the tax.

Pritzker plans to raise $75 million for his proposed budget by capping the amount of money retailers can keep for collecting sales tax for the state.

The Illinois courts have closed the door to the creative math that allowed one western suburb’s retired police officers to use a one-time $850 bonus to boost their retirement take by as much as six figures.

Delivered Feb. 20, 2019

Our summary and comments are linked here.

Part 2 of their excellent, detailed look at legal gambling in Illinois.

Our Wirepoints article republished.

“The pension system in this state is unsustainable. Taxpayers know it. Mayors across the state know it. Finance managers know it. Politicians know it. Union leaders know it. Those union leaders are simply buying time until they can cash out, leaving insolvency for the next guy.”

Although there is much more work to be done before a pilot program launch, the idea has the apparent backing of Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who said during a January 2018 interview with the editorial board of the Daily Herald newspaper in suburban Chicago that he was open to testing out the idea.

Pritzker’s combined Budget and State of the State Address is Wednesday evening.

A detailed, annual look prepared by Moody’s for the Illinois Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability.

Comment: So much nonsense being thrown around in the emergency declaration debate. The first two of Trump’s sources of funds Congress already authorized presidents to use, to be used sequentially, require no emergency declaration. For the third, Congress left the president free to define emergency. This is in fact, all a matter of reading the authorizations Congress already gave.

By Wirepoints’ Mark Glennon: “By blaming everything on Rauner and the budget impasse, a new assessment by the Pritzker administration hides the reality that our problems are structural, systemic and old. Our government is broken.”

And thanks to Crain’s for publishing a variety of viewpoints, including ours.

Comment. Miller is exactly right on this, respecting Pritzker’s plan to kick the pension funding ramp out seven more years: “The administration won’t yet say how much more money will be ‘saved’ during the coming fiscal years by extending the payment ramp, except to suggest that the near-term cost reductions might be somewhere around $800 million a year. More importantly, the administration also will not say how many more billions this scheme will wind up costing taxpayers in the long-term.”

Comment: Lots of specifics in here on what Pritzker will include in his new budget. How he will be able to claim it’s balance is a mystery.

A detailed look by an actuary, Mary Pat Campbell.

A national republication of our Wirepoints story.

“Of all the strange things that I have ever seen in government, the new governor’s plan to double 20 underlings’ salaries with his own funds is the one with the most potential to spark serious corruption.”

Comment: Is the huge employment gift for northeastern Illinois, subsidized by Wisconsin, now at risk?

Minimum wage bill cramdown.

Comment: Actually, the idea is not to sell them, but just give them to the pensions.

Comment: Wait ’till the stories you will hear if we ever get a serious investigation into disability stories at the City of Chicago.

Horrible. Our analysis will be up shortly.

“Illinois families deserve better than to be told the only real solution is in their pocketbooks.”

“A higher minimum wage. Signs of more pension borrowing. A push for a graduated income tax. If you thought the business community still had significant influence in a Democrat-dominated capitol, this week offered a kick to the gut.”

The call to tax retirement income echoes a similar proposal last week from the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago, which is made up of the city’s business elite. The Civic Federation has been pushing the idea for several years, though its recommendation hasn’t gained traction in Springfield.

Our response is linked here.

Governor Prtizker, too, is on record setting a goal of 100% renewable energy by 2050.

Illinois state Rep. Will Guzzardi last month reintroduced a bill to overturn the state’s ban on rent controls. The state’s new governor, J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat, has said he supports a repeal of the rent-control ban.

Legislation introduced last week would not only break the statewide ban on rent control but carve Illinois into six rent control regions, each with an elected seven-member board.

Comment: Consolidating administration of local pensions is a good idea and overdue, but the second idea being considered is nothing more than giving public assets away to the pensions.

Mendoza’s statement on this is linked here.

BGA’s David Greising: “The new governor so far has shown little tendency toward fiscal austerity, and initial moves like the catch-up on union pay hikes and a privately funded boost to his staff’s salaries both seem to augur more spending ahead.”

Comment: The goal of consolidating the administration of the pensions is a good one and should be pursued promptly. But the other focus of this group will be transferring public assets to the pensions. No. No more giveaways to the pensions until they are reformed and made affordable. And why was Christine Radogno named to this group, aside from cosmetic “bipartisanship?” She has a record clearly showing she fundamentally does not understand pensions, as we wrote here. Most of the others appear quite qualified, however.

Comment: This goal of 100% renewables is rightly being ridiculed to death at the national level, having been proposed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sen. Harris, Sen. Booker and others (though with a shorter time target). The cost in any event, if it were possible, would be in the trillions, yet these Illinoisans claim it would be “less than a couple bucks monthly.” Utter madness.

Many local governments in the state face severe legacy cost pressures, but Chicago appears to be in a league of its own.

“…don’t buy the hype that another expansion of gambling will represent some kind of financial panacea for our financially challenged state. Legal gambling generates revenue, but it also generates costs, including a fraying of the social fabric of society.”

An actuary’s perspective.

Comment: Blank check issued by the Pritzker administration have become routine. The cost of step pay increases, environmental goals and minimum wages paid by government have all been accompanied by “dunnos” from the administration.

Comment: Bingo. And those reforms must be sweeping enough to convince people to stay.

Comment: This is pathetic. Utterly, completely, outrageously pathetic. See our reaction linked here.

Comment: Decades too late for that message.

We will be reviewing them and giving our thoughts.

While Trump offered no specifics on the complaints or what he might do, even his hint held the potential for enormous interest in New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, and other high-tax states. The SALT cap has hit taxpayers there particularly hard, because of higher state levies, property values, and real estate taxes.

Comment: Props to Civic Federation for watching this closely.

You want job creators to abandon Illinois at an even swifter pace? Then pass a minimum wage higher than that of every surrounding state. And that’s what lawmakers are poised to do.

While Gov. J.B. Pritzker plans a budget address hoping to tout a minimum wage hike for eworkers, his administration couldn’t immediately say when the increased taxpayer costs would be calculated.

The Chicago Tribune reports the additional taxpayer cost for state government employee minimum wage hikes in the last half of Fiscal 2020, if the proposed increase from $8.25 to $9.25 kicks in next January, would be more than $80 million. The following year’s taxpayer cost would be nearly $270 million. That does not include the additional cost to taxpayers of minimum wage hikes for local government employees, or the cost

The bill is backed by education unions that will benefit from a minimum requirement for class time when they negotiate teacher contracts.

But what planet?

Welcoming 1,000 new residents a day, and explaining why they are coming (at the 5:04 mark). Maybe Pritzker will start his by saying goodbye to those who left Illinois, and enlightening us about why.

“Politicians in the scandal-ridden state of Illinois are notoriously untrustworthy. So it’s ironic that state legislators next year (November 2020) probably will propose a state constitutional amendment that asks voters, in effect, ‘How much do you trust us?’

If all goes as Gov. J.B. Pritzker plans, the query will come in the form of a proposed amendment asking voters if they wish to replace the current flat-tax mandate in the Illinois Constitution with a progressive one that allows levying ever-higher tax rates on rising levels of income.

Gov. Pritzker, remember the words of your colleague, the governor of New York: “Tax the rich. Tax the rich. Tax the rich. We did that. God forbid the rich leave.”

Comment: So much for Pritzker’s “transparency.” “While no specific bill language had been filed to Sen. Kimberly Lightford’s, D-Maywood, Senate Bill 1 as of late Tuesday, Democratic senators were expected to caucus Wednesday to hear the details of and see if they had the votes to approve a plan that has thus far been described only in a memo leaked from Pritzker’s office.”

A national republication of our Wirepoints article.

Comment: We are baffled. See our summary of this proposal and our reaction linked here.

Comment: Note the link to the NYT story that discusses our work at Wirepoints: “In 2014, several communities in Illinois discovered that officials were using mortality tables from 1971, when life expectancy was much shorter, which vastly underestimated pension costs. The resulting outcry forced those communities to update their calculations, and led to average increases in costs by about 20 percent.”

“The city is experiencing more activity than usual from buyers living in states like New York, New Jersey and Illinois.”

Comment: That $2.6 billion is for December and January. “The loss of revenue from New York’s wealthiest puts New York in a bind because the state relies on a progressive income tax system that taxes the rich at a higher rate,” says the article. Cuomo blamed it on loss of SALT deductions and the stock market, but also flight of wealthy taxpayers. Illinois income tax receipt have improved significantly this fiscal year, though they were off substantially in January.

The bill would make it criminal if a parent knowingly and with the intent to discipline transmit any message that the parent reasonably believes would coerce the minor. Hmm.

Illinois gets a ‘D.”

We know what you’re thinking, commenters.

Comment: The Comptroller’s report, linked here, is not really very candid. It’s infused with her usual message that all our problems derive from Rauner and the budget impasse, which is nonsense. And it focuses only on budget shortfalls under the conventional, phony government standards that ignore growing debt and count borrowed money as income. The rest of it has long been available from other source, including us.

“It certainly would have served Illinois if this had come out 20 years ago,” Rauner said of revelations contained in a federal affidavit. “This should have come out 20 or 30 years ago.”

“What’s amazing to me is that in the media, this is news.”

By Jay Lehr, Ph.D.,science director at The Heartland Institute.

Comment: Nah, we’ll let you count the falsehoods and deceptions here.

It’s strictly a coincidence, according to John Idler, president and general manager of ABC 7.

The investigation has reached blockbuster status: The FBI has surreptitiously recorded the speaker of the Illinois House as well as Chicago’s two most influential aldermen — City Council committee chairmen who’ve overseen zoning and finances.

At unknown intervals over almost five years, one of those aldermen, Danny Solis, has functioned as a government agent under FBI direction and control. He enabled the feds to hear who-knows-how-many conversations with who-knows-which politicians and other supplicants eager to win his favor.

“I didn’t create the law, but I’m certainly very grateful to participate in it,” Burke says of his legislative pension. “I paid the dues, not only the travel” to and from Springfield “but being disassociated from my society” in Chicago.

“This is not the easiest job,” he says. “I didn’t sit in an ivory tower . . . We were, like, the grunts.”

Some cities may not want to assume the super-high prices, congestion, “woke” politics, and massive inequality that attend the arrival of thousands of temporary, temperamental, young creative types working on the more glamorous—but also more fleeting—side of the innovation economy.

The full study is linked here.

An actuary’s perspective.

Comment: It will take some time to measure the results of the buyout plan, but don’t expect it to save the state much.

Their reaction to the monthly Crain’s article by Wirepoints’ Mark Glennon.

AFSCME Council 31’s legislative director also laid out what she described as a preliminary wish list for the union’s members.

When Gov. J.B. Pritzker gave his inaugural address a couple weeks ago, he was candid about Illinois’ financial problems with one exception. He mentioned nary a word about the pension dilemma or people like Burke who profit from it at the expense of the taxpayers who fund it.

Taking the lead in the mayor’s race are Preckwinkle with 12.7 percent, followed by Daley with 12.1 percent, former state Board of Education Chairman Gery Chico with 9.3 percent, businessman Willie Wilson with 9 percent and Mendoza with 8.7 percent. Rounding out the list is former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas with 4.3 percent; former Chicago Police Supt. Garry McCarthy with 3.7 percent; community activist Amara Enyia with 3.1 percent; former Police Board President Lori Lightfoot with 2.8 percent; state Rep. La Shawn Ford with 1.2 percent; former Ald. Robert Fioretti with 0.9 percent; lawyer Jerry Joyce with 0.9

“To begin with, Wisconsin’s government pension fund is in sound shape. Also, unlike in Illinois, the public-sector union here has been neutralized by Act 10, curbing its collective bargaining power…. And, truth be told, the law stands as a bulwark against the type of fiscal calamity besetting Illinois.”

“With our president doing everything he can to attack immigrants and refugees in Illinois, I want to make it clear from the beginning of my administration that we’re going to stand up for all of our children and families. Illinois should be a state where all have access to opportunity and the ability to thrive, and my administration is taking steps to advance that goal.” Press release and executive order linked here.

Illinois’ fastest-growing jobs sector in 2018 was government – another sign the state needs pro-growth reforms to keep up with the rest of the country.

Comment: What will it cost? Nobody knows, and nobody in our ace press corpse asked. he And Pritzker offered no details about specific state laws, regulations or policies that would need to change for Illinois to comply with terms of the Paris Agreement. In particular, he did not respond directly to questions about how long existing coal-fired power plants should be allowed to continue operating in the state, or how such a change would affect the state’s coal industry, which provides some of the fuel to those plants.

Comment: As we wrote earlier this week, nobody even asks about the cost to consumers of meeting Alliance goals instead of using the most efficient source available. It’s a blank check. But question this and your a “science hater,” Pritzker says.

Comment: Just what Illinois needed — more policy agenda thrown on employers’ backs.

Comment: Wacko. Utterly impossible to entirely eliminate fossil fuels, and it would be outrageously expensive for consumers if it were.

Illinois is not compliant with a U.S. Supreme Court decision outlining how states can go about requiring online retailers to collect sales taxes on products sold within their borders, according to an analysis by the Washington-based Tax Foundation.

A township in central Illinois that overtaxed residents for years is returning more than $735,000 to local property taxpayers, a rare rebate that one lawmaker said he wants to see happen in more of the state’s 1,400 townships.

A republication of our Wirepoints article.

By Tim Schneider, IL Republican Party Chairman.

“For every one person of working age, you’ll have one person who’s either too young to work or too old to work,” Harger said. “You’ll have the dependent populations who can’t contribute very much into the system and at the same time the burden for paying for it is falling on a shrinking group of working-age people.”

Over 27% of your cellphone bill is tax, according to the Tax Foundation report.

Residential property tax collections have grown three times faster than incomes in Illinois since 2000. The Wirepoints report with background research is linked here.

Comment: This will require a pension obligation bond — borrowing: “You can grow your way, as a state and as an economy, if you can flatten out the payments.” he said.

“The state’s entire fate flows from its ability to balance its books once and for all. Yet the new governor made no mention of it in his inaugural address.”

Comment: We don’t like it because he wants no pension reforms, but big salute to him for offering something detailed and specific. Other candidates are mostly just blabbering.

Comment: 200 pensioners have taken the deal so far. Illinois has over 970,000 pensioners. This program will not have a material impact on unfunded liabilities.

“Amid this mayoral race, let’s have some renewed discussion about “merit selection” of judges, with appointments made based on recommendations by panels of experts who are far more qualified to make a choice than a voter buttonholed by a precinct captain.”

Donald Trump’s tax overhaul got Bloomington, Illinois, executive Jim Morris looking at South Florida for a $10 million-plus mansion with his own piece of beach, low property levies and no state income tax. “It’s not just the weather,” he said. “The advantages of the tax code are greatly appreciated.”

Lou Lang’s year-two pension? More than $101,000. Not bad for a lobbyist who will be collecting a private salary as well.

Another ranking putting Illinois 2d worst behind New Jersey.

Including a fourth deputy governor.

Some states keep local politicians from running for a new office while holding another by requiring elected officials to resign their current seat before filing to run for the next one.