By Michael Lucci
04/28/2014
Do high taxes help or hinder a state? The Fiscal Policy Center at Voices for Illinois Children thinks high taxes are a good thing. The group released a study recently claiming that states that levy high personal income taxes outperform states that don’t tax income at all. They use their study as a justification for...
By Benjamin VanMetre
02/28/2013
The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, or BEA, announced today that Illinois ranked 42nd in personal income growth in 2012.
by Kate Piercy The Mercatus Center’s Research Fellow Matt Mitchell used data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis to analyze the evolution of state, local, and private spending since 1950. Mitchell created a chart showing the spending level for each year from 1950 to 2009 and compares spending by state and local governments to spending in...
by Kate Piercy The Mercatus Institute’s Veronique de Rugy used “data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis to compare recent changes in government expenditures to those in private domestic investment.” What did she find? Government consumption and investment have generally grown more quickly than private expenditures and investment during the last decade. In the last...
By Chris Andriesen
07/07/2010
Recently, a number of Illinois state government employees received pay raises in the midst of an economic recession and ongoing budget crisis. Was this an isolated incident? No, it’s a trend. The chart above was constructed using data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and it shows the compensation of public and private employees indexed against the first...
By Collin Hitt
03/20/2008
Many Illinois children are currently trapped in failing public schools. Most of these children, whose futures are put at risk due simply to geography and bureaucracy, would thrive if given equal choices and greater educational opportunities. Those opportunities can come in the form of the expansion of a simple tax credit—the Illinois Education Expense Tax...
