“Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s employment record is in — and Illinois is trailing the nation,” reports The Illinois Policy Institute.
“Here’s more on that and what else is happening in Illinois:
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Illinois has an unusually high student absenteeism rate, and low student achievement despite higher-than-average educational spending.
Thousands of Chicago school laptops ended up in China, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America.
Illinois legislators allocated $500,000 to a non-existent college.
Illinois spends more on dismally-bad colleges than on apprenticeships and workforce training. Over the years, it has spent billions of dollars on awful schools that graduate few of their students, like Chicago State University, which had an 11% graduation rate in 2016.
Illinois has a lousy educational system despite having the nation’s highest property taxes. Illinois has “an effective property tax rate of 1.83%, the typical Illinois homeowner paid around $4,584 that year.” By contrast, neighboring Indiana has an average property tax rate of 0.77%, neighboring Kentucky has an average rate of 0.73%, and Missouri has a average rate of 0.88%.
Progressive Illinois has much higher taxes than neighboring Indiana, whose taxes are $4,050 less per household. Yet conservative Indiana provides better roads (it ranks #2 in road quality, compared to Illinois being only #30), and Indiana processes people’s tax returns much faster and more accurately than Illinois does, and has a better criminal justice system. Illinois should be able to do better than Indiana, because it is much more fortunate than Indiana (Illinois contains wealthy Chicago suburbs that generate lots of tax revenue. Indiana lacks similarly populous wealthy areas to finance it.)
But somehow, Illinois has managed to run up vastly higher levels of debt than Indiana. In 2025, Illinois had at least $70 billion in debt (and $144 billion in unfunded pension obligations), compared to $30 billion in state debt for Indiana.
