Download a pdf of this report and chart here. If Illinois continues on its current path, the amount of money that state government spends on the State Universities Retirement System, or SURS, will eclipse the amount of general funds given to public universities and community colleges. The graphic below demonstrates how the rising costs of...
by Mark Cavers A new report from the Pew Center on the States takes a look at how each state is doing in funding their pension obligations. The report, based on data from fiscal year 2009, shows that Illinois had the lowest funding ratio, with 51% of our pension liabilities funded. The next closest state is...
by Kristina Rasmussen As Illinois’s service sector grows (accounting for 32 percent of Illinois’s economy in 1977 and 48 percent in 2009), so has the desire to tax it. In 2009, the Illinois Senate tried to expand the state sales tax to a number of services (chimney sweeps, animal shelters, interior design services, and so on),...
Chicago residents face twin financial crises at Chicago Public Schools and City Hall, driven by the costs of public employee pensions. The steep tab for the retirement benefits of school and city employees is coming due. More retirees than ever are collecting pension checks. And state law will soon require the City and CPS to...
Lawmakers raised the personal income tax rate by 67 percent and the corporate income tax rate by 46 percent in a late night, lame-duck session in January 2011. This legislation also reinstated the estate tax and suspended the net operating loss deductions for corporations. The Illinois Policy Institute’s report “Leaving Illinois: An Exodus of People and...
by Mark Cavers Bloomberg Business Week reports that legislators in Missouri are moving to reject some federal money to fund work that would speed up rail travel between St. Louis and Kansas City. The mounting concerns over future costs to Missourians echo similar concerns in a host of other states that have rejected federal money. Over...
by Mark Cavers In January, the General Assembly passed a tax hike that is projected to take around seven billion dollars from the taxpayers of Illinois. Tax hikes like this one get a lot of attention from the media for the harm they cause businesses and taxpayers. But there are other government policies that can be just as harmful...
by Mark Cavers In the case of a government “shutdown” the government doesn’t actually shut down. Rather, essential services remain up and running: Military personnel in Iraq don’t suddenly fly home, TSA agents don’t stay in bed, and the IRS doesn’t stop collecting taxes (although, in a particularly cruel bit of irony, they stop sending...
by Mark Cavers Last week Bloomberg News reported that bond markets are reacting poorly to Governor Quinn’s tax and spend approach. Rather than putting the state back on firm ground, we are in a more precarious position then we were four months ago. From the Bloomberg article: “The market seems unimpressed with Quinn’s plans. The extra yield investors...
by Amanda Griffin-Johnson Today, the Tax Foundation released their annual report on the Tax Freedom Day for each of the fifty states. The Tax Freedom Day measures the number of days Americans have to work to pay for all their annual taxes at the federal, state and local level. The national Tax Freedom Day for 2011 is...
by Brian Costin With election day rapidly approaching, and early voting already underway, citizens in a number of Cook County communities are in the process deciding on 10 property tax hike referendums. A 2006 reform to state laws intended to give voters an accurate estimate of how a property tax hike referendum would affect them....
by Amanda Griffin-Johnson Mercatus senior research fellow Veronique de Rugy’s latest publication describes the dire consequences of the federal government’s spending trajectory. She shows the long-term divergence between federal government spending and tax revenue in the chart below. As Veronique de Rugy explains: If we do not change course, servicing this debt will end up as our biggest...
Following the Senate Republicans’ press conference Thursday, Illinois Statehouse News released an interview with the governor’s budget spokesperson, Kelly Kraft. In her interview, Kelly paints a doomsday picture of what Illinois would be like after cutting $6 billion from the budget. Kelly states the governor has already made dramatic budget cuts, but we know that’s not true....
by Collin Hitt The Illinois Policy Institute released Budget Solutions 2012 on Tuesday, March 8. To date, it is the only detailed, balanced, sustainable budget plan that has been published on state government general fund spending. The plan contains several recommendations for education and Medicaid spending, but it also includes one idea that was completely new and...