By: Ted Dabrowski
On Sunday I traveled to Milwaukee for a quick family trip. Beautiful sunny day. Great food in the Third Ward. The lakefront was hopping. Life was good.
Not being dumb, I made sure to fill up the car on my way back home to Illinois. Somewhere along the way on Interstate 94, some 15 minutes before reaching the Illinois border, I filled up the gas tank. I was excited to see gas below $4 a gallon for the first time in a while – $3.96 to be exact.
I made sure to check what prices were when I got home so I could see just how badly Illinoisans are getting hit. At a Wilmette gas station a few blocks from my house it was $5.05 a gallon – more than a dollar higher.
Ok, it’s not a dollar difference everywhere in Illinois, but a look at the average prices on AAA for both Illinois and Wisconsin showed a difference of almost 75 cents on July 31, 2022 ($4.646 vs. $3.907).
It’s no wonder Illinoisans are so ticked off about fuel prices here in Illinois vs. the lower prices in other states. In case you didn’t know it, Illinois has the highest gas prices of any state east of the Rockies.
So what contributes to that one dollar difference?
- When Gov. J.B. Pritzker took office in 2019, the state’s motor fuel tax was a flat 19 cents per gallon. That same year he doubled the tax to 38 cents.
- Pritzker also added a new feature which increases gas prices by inflation each year going forward. That’s added $1.2 cents to the gas tax so far. There will be bigger increases next year.
- Then there is the sales tax on gasoline in Illinois. Illinois is one of just seven states to tack on a sales tax to gasoline prices. That’s on top of the motor fuel taxes I mentioned above. So as gas prices go up, so, too, do the gas taxes Illinoisans pay. Those sales taxes have pushed overall state gas taxes higher since 2019 by about 13 cents.
Add up all of the state gas tax increases since Gov. Pritzker took office and they’ve doubled from 32 cents to 65 cents, an increase of 33 cents. They are the reason Illinoisans now pay the second-highest gas taxes in the country, according to the American Petroleum Institute.
Meanwhile, Wisconsin has a flat 30.9 cent motor fuel tax and a 2 cent inspection fee. Those taxes haven’t changed since at least 2019.
Taxes don’t explain all the gas price differences between Illinois and its neighboring states – there are other regulatory and environmental requirements in Illinois that push up prices here even higher – but there’s no denying that higher gas taxes have contributed to the pains Illinoisans face at the pump.
What’s amazing is that the spike in gas prices means there’s been a windfall in state gas tax revenues and yet Gov. Pritzker has done nothing to cut gas taxes.
Instead, his administration has enjoyed those windfall revenues – never mind the squeeze put on struggling Illinoisans.
Read more from Wirepoints:
- High taxes, bad policy: The anatomy of Illinois’ record-high gas taxes on Memorial Day
- Thirty years of pain: Illinoisans suffer as property tax bills grow far faster than household incomes, home values
- Pritzker administration pushes back against Wirepoints’ critique of latest “Disaster Declaration.” Our response.
- DeSantis’s Florida blows away entire country in competition for people and their wealth
- Pritzker Honed His Presidential Stump Speech In Florida – With Hatred And Dishonesty
Audio and summary 
If this bill passes, say goodbye to local control over all Illinois parks and expect to see open drug and alcohol use, needles, no sanitation and fire hazards, but no ordinary park users.
Just paid $3.49.9 @ Woodmans in Beloit, Wi. 10 vehicles gassing up, 8 with Illinois plates. Groceries, adult beverages (no additional tax either) and lunch made it a pleasant afternoon.
It’s now $3.39.9 at the same Woodmans. Every car at a pump had Illinois plates.
3.68 down the street from me in Florida, just checked.
It’s the Illinois way. Stop complaining. That extra dollar pays for the best road network in the country.
We even pay more than Detroit and they don’t have a wheel tax in Michigan or a single toll road.
Tax and spend. Tax and spend. Tax and spend. Tax and spend. Kiss the ring of the public unions. Tax and spend. Cut services to pay terrific public pensions and medical benefits, but ie triple pension funding. Tax and spend. Tax and spend. Dinner with the gang at Mortons. Tax and spend. Check my public pension statement. Tax and spend. Political mismanagement of: public sector remuneration; property taxes; addressing political corruption; massive unemployment fraud; backed-up courts; many kids cannot read and do math at grade level; catch and release crime; tax and spend; inefficient road building; inefficient rehab of Ohare;… Read more »
Stop complaining Illinois. Nobody forced you to live there. You want a better life? Get off your bottoms and go find it.
The problem with your observation is that fleeing encourages corruption and ineptitude to flourish.
You are right though that at some point it is obviously a lost cause, a hopeless fight.
Hardest to swallow is that this orchestrated bust-out of state assets is bringing obscene profits to the orchestrators now…and even bigger profits will follow when taxpayers must back their overleveraged borrowings to buy up all the busted-out assets (land title) on the cheap.
There is only one hope to defeat these bad guys: victims having nothing left to lose, then who knows what victims will do to survive.
Susan, vote with your feet.
vote the bums out now
The good people are outnumbered.
Who was the last bum voted out in Illinois?
Rauner
He was ineffective, not a bum.
Voting isn’t effective self defense against a uniparty corrupt system.
Fleeing is a good short term solution for a few people, but in the longterm their little pockets of safety will be subsumed by the cancer they left behind.
Agree. Sooner or later we will have to make a stand. The progressive cancer will not stop with blue states. They certainly cannot let a “West Germany/East Germany” situation play out. They will not stop until we stop them.
Susan and Prozac,
Like you, I tried to fight for years. The debt got bigger, my taxes went higher, and liberal ideology grew. Finally realized the situation in Illinois for me was hopeless so I exercised my last remaining option, to flee. Now Illinois doesn’t have my tax dollars for their corruption and waste. You want to fight? Then leave. Illinois can’t continue indefinitely with fewer and fewer taxpayers.
Here’s the problem.with those who say to flee. Where should someone flee to? Kentucky is flooding and underwater. Arizona is burning up with most days well over 100. Most states in the west are burning and are in a massive drought. What happens when the wells run dry? East coast has more and more noreasters/flooding/hurricanes ( sharks LOL) Florida is OK now but with rising oceans and more hurricanes expected to hit (CAT 3-5) the eutopia can quickly become dystopia or hell. Not many escape routes for a hurricane. The southern border is overrun by illegals by the millions. So… Read more »
There is no such place as perfect weather or climate outside of Tuscany and Aux en Provence. That being said, staying and fighting isn’t an option when more than half of the IL population supports a progressive government. My guess is that half those voters actually believe the nonsense they peddle (no cash bail, abortion after birth, etc). The other half is cynical of IL government stupidly believe that white Republicans are racists, and they can’t associate with the natives. There’s no fixing the situation. I find Ann Coulter’s brief history of Venezuela to be instructive. The population elected socialists… Read more »
I’m doing fine in Tennessee, but you keep looking for perfection and let us all know when you find it.
All of the recent elections show that the people of Illinois want the current dystopia.
Collective taxpayers don’t matter as takers outnumber makers.
No state is perfect, but objectively almost all states are a better place to live than Illinois. When you move to a new state where you’re not outnumbered and your voice can be heard, you can fight to make that state a better place.
The only way to be safe from high taxes, phony cash grabbing environmental issues, crooked politicians, corrupt teachers unions, potholes and a$$holes is to leave the United States and move to somewhere off the grid. Every state in the United States is or will be too expensive, corrupted, full of woke know-it-alls and definitely not a safe haven. The country’s going down the tubes just get the hell out.
Go to Indiana!
Oklahoma. Honest elections, beef, oil, and freedom.
Short term? Move on! You would be surprised what life is like outside Illinois.
When you are mugged or taxed into homelessness Susan then try and lecture us about how *noble* it is to stay in Illinois.
It’s not noble to stay, pay and continue to fund/enable the crooks in Illinois.
Agree Indy. A strategic retreat is simply common sense, especially when the enemy will end up destroying itself.
When you are outnumbered, a strategic retreat is what you do to save yourself.
I don’t entirely disagree, as long as those retreating understand that they are not safe and need to keep fighting.
Correct, but it’s easier to fight the good fight in a state where you’re not outnumbered. Case in point. There were two recent proposed developments in my semi-rural county in NC that would have spoiled some pastoral areas. A mix of locals and transplants organized and shut down both developments. The developers never stood a chance as the opponents gave highly professional presentations backed by experts and studies to the county board, which is something that had not been done before. The common response from all the transplants, who are mostly from the north, was “We all saw our wonderful… Read more »
I hope your are right, and that the fight is successful in the “free states”.
I considered moving, but in the end I decided that freedom is not guaranteed in those states either, in view of the larger national picture. Only one thing is guaranteed by moving: that I would be 1,000 miles away from my family.
It’s not noble for good people to give their hard earned money to people who only laugh at them and consider the taxpayers to be suckers.
Remember, the easiest day you ever worked at your job, was still harder than the hardest day any politician ever worked.
The good people are the victims, and who wants to be a victim?
Who wants to lose all their money while the politicians feast on our money and get richer while we all get poorer?
Sorry bud, Indiana and Wisconsin are not the promised land…yet
Yup, though perhaps Florida is pretty close!
Yes it is!
Except Indiana is #1 and Wisconsin #5 on the list of states where Illinois folks are moving to by volume.
Illinois gas taxes are slowly driving state-border gas sellers out of business
https://www.foxbusiness.com/lifestyle/illinoisans-crossing-border-escape-high-gas-taxes
I always buy my gas in Wisconsin. $0.35 to 0.95 cents a gallon. I save more in one fillip of 10 gallons than 100 gallons of JB’s suspended $0.22 cents tax. Better roads up that way as well. Most stations I stop at are full of Illinois plated cars.
$3.30 where I’m at.
Thanks, I’ll pay the extra dollar not to live in Oklahoma?
Say that when Chicago is nuked by Russia.
Or China for that matter.
And 1) Where has the gas tax money gone to? Every penny is supposed to be for ‘roads and bridges’ 2) Why is Pritzker wanting taxpayers to subsidize the buyers of $70k EV’s who pay no gas tax, and thus do not support the roads they drive on?
You’re paying for the Services you’ve received from your betters in govt.
You gotta pay for your Services. IL Services are so much better than other states! It’s the Services!
Other states don’t have paved roads, and bridges, and public education, and universities, and running water, and bureaucrats, and electricity, and other great stuff provided by the Springfield swamp.
And superior leadership like hawking Illinois as an abortion mecca. Brock, appreciate your sarcasm!
There is a lack of focus in the media over tax policy. A dollar or so difference a gallon is painful, but is really painful to those making 50,000 a year. Any savvy political opponent should make light of the number of highly regressive taxes passed after the defeat of the progressive tax amendment, and that the impact of such taxes really damages the lower middle and middle class. Unfortunately, people at large don’t pay attention to tax policy and the media knows next to nothing about economics. Our system – like it or not – treats capital better than… Read more »
The poor are aware of these taxes but many of them are too poor and living a day to day existence to get up and move.