If Illinois could have reduced corruption to the national average, an estimated 79,000 fewer people would be living in poverty, according to an analysis by the Illinois Policy Institute. State lawmakers can help by passing ethics reforms.
Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker wanted to renege on the promised $350 million increase in education spending until state lawmakers pushed back. He still wants to cut the scholarship program low-income and minority students use when public education doesn’t fit them.
Illinois was the nation’s fifth-largest state until 2020 census data was released. Now Pennsylvania’s population exceeds Illinois’ to take the No. 5 spot.
Illinois will lose one representative in the U.S. House. The state’s population declined for the first time in over 200 years, the 10-year U.S. Census count showed.
The Illinois General Assembly busies itself with limiting balloon releases and regulating pitchfork fishing along highways when ethics reform is the need in a state with a rich history of corruption.
Both police reform advocates and law enforcement supporters face the same serious obstacle in Illinois: police union contracts include provisions protecting officers from discipline. Those contracts carry more weight than state law.
A tax credit is providing scholarships for Illinois’ low-income and minority students, but Gov. J.B. Pritzker is targeting the program that lets them thrive when public schools are a poor fit.
High courts in Wisconsin and Michigan have both ruled governors cannot repeatedly issue disaster declarations as a basis for mask mandates and other orders without legislative approval. A year into the pandemic, Illinois’ governor is still doing it.
Former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan will collect $85,000 a year, but in a little more than a year his pension will shoot up to nearly $150,000 a year.