Illinois’ fiscal woes are significantly deeper and more serious than generally realized, with the state facing a $9 billion operating deficit in the fiscal year that begins July 1.

That’s the horrific bottom line of a report released late today by researchers at the University of Illinois Institute of Government and Public Affairs, a study that may raise the eyebrows even of Gov. Bruce Rauner, who has been warning of huge financial problems ahead.

The conclusion: The actual deficit is about twice what is commonly reported, with the hole in the current fiscal 2015 budget not $2 billion to $3 billion but $6 billion, and rising to a projected $9 billion in fiscal 2016 and hitting $14 billion by fiscal 2026, assuming no changes in law or spending practices.

Imagine you’re a single mom or dad with two kids. You make $12 an hour. Times are tight but you have a strong work ethic. One day, your boss comes to you with some good news. Your diligence has paid off — you’re being offered a pay increase to $18 an hour. This would raise your annual wages to $37,440, up from $24,960.

Great news, right? Not so fast. Taking that pay hike could set your family back in unforeseen ways.

You could be walking of a cliff — a welfare cliff, to be precise. This is when another dollar earned leads to a significant drop in government “safety net” benefits, making it less enticing to earn more income.

In Cook County, and throughout Illinois, if you are charged with a crime, your release from jail depends on the wallet’s thickness.

Nearly 80 percent of all criminal defendants were held in jail after their first court appearance in 2011, according to data from Loyola University.  The majority of those defendants, charged with non-violent or relatively minor crimes, could go home if only they were able to come up with enough cash.

But as anyone with experience with indigent defendants knows, coming up with even small amounts of bail money can be difficult, if not impossible, for poor defendants. And the majority of defendants are poor; nationwide, about 80 percent of defendants qualify for a free attorney. Of those who walked out of the Cook County Jail in 2011, only one third did so because they made bond. Of the 67 percent of defendants who were not able to bail themselves out, the majority were eventually released on probation, sentenced to time-served, or released when the charges were dropped entirely.

Illinois is losing population to warmer climates, but it’s not the bouts of sub-zero weather that are driving people out of the state.

According to new census data and other figures, between July 2013 and July 2014, the state shrunk by 10,000 residents. This should be cause for alarm; other states in decline included West Virginia, Connecticut and Alaska.

While the weather in Illinois this time of year isn’t necessarily inviting, people follow jobs.

The other day, I argued that maybe we should rethink our current policy of endlessly dumping more money into college education. It’s completely true that there is a big wage premium for having a college degree — but it does not therefore follow that we will make everyone better off by trying to shove every American through post-secondary (aka tertiary) education. We may simply be setting up college as a substitute for a high school diploma: a signal to employers that you can read and write, and are able to turn in scheduled assignments within a reasonable time frame. And in the process, excluding people who aren’t college-educated from access to decent jobs.

Predictably, this was not met with shouts of joy and universal admiration in all quarters. I was accused of just wanting to stick it to President Barack Obama, and also of wishing to deny the dream of college education that should be the birthright of every single American. I was also accused of being unfamiliar with the known fact that America woefully underinvests in education compared to other advanced nations.

It is true that I am unfamiliar with America’s woeful underinvestment in education, in the same way that I am unfamiliar with the tooth fairy, because both are legends with no basis in fact. American spending on education is in line with that of our peers in the developed world — a little higher than some, a little lower than others, but not really remarkable either way:

Every two years, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) publishes a study calledWho Pays? A Distributional Analysis of the Tax Systems in All 50 States. Yesterday, the fifth edition was released. The report “assess[es] the fairness of state and local tax systems by measuring the state and local taxes that will be paid in 2015 by different income groups as a share of their incomes.” The report’s key measure is the effective tax rate faced by various income groups when we consider state and local property, sales, excise, individual income, and corporate income taxes. Somewhat surprisingly, ITEP finds that every single state tax system is regressive, taxing lower income individuals more than they tax the wealthy.

Here are six issues we found with the latest edition of Who Pays? (Note that several of these are similar to critiques we made regarding the 2013 edition of the report, which still stand two years later.)