Only Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s progressive income tax amendment will appear on the ballot in November. Voters were denied a chance to make critical reforms to state government.

A bill to make more public records readily available would better show taxpayers how local governments spend money.

The years 2010 through 2019 will go down in Illinois history as a decade of public policy failure and economic decline. High fixed costs for pensions and government worker health care have prevented the state from balancing its budget in any year since 2001. Since the Great Recession in 2008, the state’s fiscal imbalance has...