Totaling the unsustainable tax increases and windfall revenue during Pritzker Administration – Wirepoints
May 26, 2026
23 Comments
With $162 billion more from taxpayers, couldn’t you deliver a few bond upgrades, too
-- Connecting the dots between our economy, government and business --
Audio and summary 
A largely unasked question is becoming glaring: Is Illinois doing all it should to use artificial intelligence to make government cost less and work better? So far, the evidence says no.
Why the Trump Administration’s Tariffs were necessary is understood within the historical and economic context of the USA and Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference remarked, “…the euphoria of this triumph led us to a dangerous delusion: that we had entered, quote, “the end of history,” that every nation would now be a liberal democracy; that the ties formed by trade and by commerce alone would now replace nationhood; that the rules-based global order… would now replace the national interest; and that we would now live in a… Read more »
The grandstanding is all JB Pritzker has – Just another canival barker it seems.
Guess he ran out of things to tax and is suing for a big win.
Numbskull.
I hope JB gets a bill for the billions of federal dollars spent fraudulently harboring illegals or better yet gets the cuffs slapped on him. Start digging into why Hyatt hotels received tax payer money
Don’t hold your breath on a refund that Springrad will promptly pocket to balance the budget, JB. Trump correctly stated yesterday that he has tariff powers due to the latest roadblock he can now use and any litigation about repayment will be tied up for years in the courts.
How about a REFUND for all THE TAXES YOU IMPOSED ON ILLINOIS RESIDENTS??
I’ve removed ALL of the toliets in my Chicago condo and just use the bathrub!!
Saves me $15,000 per year in property taxes.
Trump has any letters from putzger designated spam
Submitting a false invoice to the Feds might be illegal. Too bad JB the Hutt bought his degree instead of earning it, or he would have known
In any case, JB the Hutt played himself.
How did you come up with this total Mr. mathematician, just like your so called balanced budgets such a joke Pritzker.
It’s a rather easy calculation. You divide the amount of tariff revenue attributed to Trump’s tariffs by the number of households in the U.S. The figure Pritzker uses has been quoted in the press so he didn’t need to do the math himself.
Actually, there’s lots of dispute about who actually bears the tariffs. It’s some spread among consumer, the exporter and the importer/retailer,
The $1700 per family cost is a nonsense figure as that is just tariff revenue divided by number of households. The tariffs are actually paid by those who import goods and then they decide how much of that cost is to be passed on or if their foreign supplier will absorb some of the cost of those tariffs. I agree with who bears the tariffs, or as economists call it the incidence of the tariffs. The estimates I’ve heard so far is consumers will eventually pick up 70% to 95% of the tariff’s costs.
You’ve contradicted yourself. Are you saying it’s paid by the importer or the consumer? My best guess, which I admit is mostly intuition, is that about a third of the incidence falls on consumers, a third on the exporter and a third on the importer/retailer.
It’s physically paid by the importer and the importer determines how much to pass on to the consumer. That’s where the estimates of 70 to 95 percent are passed onto the consumer come from. Studies of the incidence of Trump’s tariffs in his first administration show that consumer prices of goods affected by the tariffs went up by the amount of the tariffs in most cases.
Highly disputed by different “experts.”
There are 3 entities that pay the tariffs. The exporter, the importer, and the end consumer of the imported goods. The Perterson Institute for International Economics did a study in September 2025 that showed exporters were paying virtually none of the tariffs and that U.S. businesses were absorbing most of the tariffs. That means that tariffs, which are taxes, are being paid by the private sector of the U.S. economy, whether it’s the business who does the importing or the end consumer of those goods. It’s believed that the end consumer will pick up more of the tariff expense as… Read more »
What, you don’t think Trump, who says the exporters pay it, is an expert?! Just kidding. You have a point. I think the bulk of experts say, as you said, that the exporter bears a comparatively small part of tariffs, and I was being sloppy saying it’s probably a third. It does depend heavily on the particular industry. But that’s part of why I generally don’t like tariffs — US consumers and companies pay most of them.
As you might have noticed I generally don’t like tariffs either.
There is no dispute that the poor pay a much higher proportion of their income to the tariffs. The Rich pay a much lower percentage of their income. As usual the rich and powerful in America are treated differently. There is also no dispute that a Tariff is a tax. Republicans use to be against taxes, now Trumpy’s think they are good.
Just to be clear, I don’t like Trump’s use of tariffs and I think the court was right to strike most of them down. Some are OK, namely when they are designed to achieve reciprocity in trade terms, or to counter an adversary like China, or to protect strategically vital industries, but that’s about it.
Tariffs are how the United States avoided an income tax for the first 124 years of its federal government, from the Tariff Act of 1789 until the ratification of the 16th Amendment in 1913, when income taxes became constitutional and gradually supplanted tariffs as the primary revenue source. In fact, the so-called Most Favored Nation status, now often referred to as Normal Trade Relations, means only that a most-favored nation receives the lowest tariff available to any trading partner, promoting equal treatment in trade. Nearly every country on earth charged the United States, for decades, a higher tariff rate than… Read more »
“The free trade was never reciprocal, not by a long shot, and it became cheaper to sell to America than for Americans to sell abroad.” Right. That has been the problem. That’s why I said Trump is right to use tariffs as a tool to get reciprocity. That was his original theme and he should have stuck to it. Sound legal basis for that, too (though I have not yet read the new Sup. Ct. opinion). But he uses tariffs for whatever he feels like, such as one on Canada because Ontario ran a TV ad he did not like.… Read more »
Ramp up tariffs to high levels while offsetting personal income taxes and there’s a winning solution for everyone. We’ve been stuck in the status quo for so long and we have massive trade deficits and any sort of thinking outside of the box is a good thing. It’s feasible at some point to replace income tax with tariffs. Not overnight, but in due time. Of the $3T in personal income, at least $1T of that is lost to fraud, at least according to one expert before a house subcommittee panel last week. The Quality Learing Center debacle a few weeks… Read more »
Many good points but Trump’s meaning of the word reciprocity and the meaning you have for that word are completely different.
It doesn’t seem that tariffs are saving many manufacturing jobs. In Trump’s first year in office (second term) manufacturing jobs declined by about 80k. To be fair they declined by about 100k in Biden’s last year. As I pointed out in a comment above, tariffs are nothing more than a tax on the private sector. If tariffs do create more manufacturing jobs, and I don’t believe they will in any meaningful way, U.S. businesses and consumers will be footing that bill. The Cato institute did a study of job losses in the steel industry from 1980 to 2017. In 1980… Read more »
” It’s technology that’s causing most manufacturing jobs to disappear, not tariffs, although tariffs do eliminate some jobs.”
An incorrectly written sentence. I meant to say that trade does eliminate manufacturing jobs but technology is responsible for more job losses in that sector than foreign trade.