America's Talking - Illinois spending swells 43% under Pritzker

Episode Date: September 25, 2025

(The Center Square) – Discretionary spending by Illinois state leaders has increased more than $16 billion since J.B. Pritzker became governor nearly seven years ago. That is a total increase of about 43%. Before Pritzker, the state's general fund spending was roughly flat or had modest increases, according to state data. Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner was in office for part of that time. Support this podcast: https://secure.anedot.com/franklin-news-foundation/ce052532-b1e4-41c4-945c-d7ce2f52c38a?source_code=xxxxxx Read more: https://www.thecentersquare.com/illinois/article_d5bc09e2-ab3d-48c6-9f7d-3ef6ce6bc0f0.html Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Since Governor J.B. Prisker took over as Illinois governor, budgets have gone up $16 billion. Previously, before his time in office, the budgets were flat or fluctuated a little bit. But since he came in, budgets have skyrocketed. My name is Art Kane. I'm managing editor of investigations at the Center Square, and I'm joined by Jared Strong, investigative reporter at the Center Square. Jared looked into the budgets and he found a lot of money going out of the state legislature. What did you find, Jared? Well, Illinois has had budget problems for decades. Deficit spending was the norm for more than 20 years until relatively recently.

And lawmakers approve that deficit spending, even though it's barred by the state constitution, by underfunding the state's pension system, not paying bills and borrowing money. And now the pension fund is about $100 billion short. So in the past decade or so, we've had this push and pull around whether to increase or cut the budget and whether to increase or cut taxes. There was a years-long budget impasse when former Republican governor, Bruce Rowner, was governor. He wanted to cut spending rather than raise taxes. but under J.B. Pritzker, discretionary spending has increased about 43% or $16 billion,

like he said, since he took office in 2019. Now, they have had actual balanced budgets starting with the 2024 fiscal year, but Illinois, like other states, has been buoyed by, you know, federal funding and increased sales tax revenues since the coronavirus pandemic began, and those are starting to diminish. So in the most recent budget that was passed this year, lawmakers have increased spending for health and nutrition programs, education and economic development.

And they've in part compensated for those spending increases by raising taxes on things like tobacco, vaping, sports betting, and businesses. And that's only supposed to generate about a billion dollars a year. So there's still quite a gap. So you're looking into where the spending went. Do you have a sense, preliminarily, where a lot of this money went and how much taxes the taxpayers have had to pay because of it? Yeah, well, it's kind of, it's a bit broad, really. You know, K-12 education spending has been, it's been underfunded in Illinois for quite a while. It's one of the reasons why the state has extremely high property tax rates.

Essentially, the state wasn't contributing enough to cover the costs of running the schools. So it's been on those local districts to raise that revenue through property taxes. So Illinois has been either had the highest property tax rates in the country or been in the top three for quite a while. the really the spending increases have just been have been generally just gone up in in recent years and you know it's not like they've had an influx of a bunch of new residents in fact I think people are leaving Illinois maybe because of the taxes as one reason how do they justify those kind of increases when you're not increasing population

inflation spiked in the last year, but it's been fairly flat over the last five years that you looked at. What's their justification? Well, we don't have one directly from the governor's office, which declined our request for interviews. But essentially, you know, lawmakers are making the case and the governor's making the case that certain areas have been underfunded over time. You know, policy experts say that Illinois has suffered from a source. structural deficit, a structural budget deficit for a very, very long time. And that's when revenue growth is not enough to pay for, you know, inflation-related increases in a year-to-year expenses or to pay existing debt obligations. So we really have kind of two camps here, you know,

are we going to, is Illinois going to decrease its spending or is it going to increase its taxes? Now, there are some that say it's the way that Illinois tax. taxes, that is the problem. The state has a flat income tax, meaning that every resident, working resident, pays the same percentage of their income, whereas normally most states have a graduated system where lower income people pay a smaller percentage and higher, and it gradually increases that percentage based on how much people are making. And then a problem with the sales tax. Illinois is a bit of a loaner in how it taxes services.

So where a state like Iowa, where I live, might have sales taxes on close to 100 different services. Illinois is maybe a quarter of that. So we're talking about like, you know, haircuts and getting your car repaired. So some people think that if you broaden that sales tax base, that might allow the sales tax percentage to go down. while also generating more sales tax money. And so it's interesting because obviously

Kricker's name has been bandied about as a possible presidential candidate, but he refused to talk about his budgets. What does that say about transparency and accountability in Illinois if he's raising the budgets but doesn't want to explain why? That's a great question. I guess we'll see where things go. I mean, there's so much uncertainty in the future. Again, like I said, Illinois just recently had its first real,

series of balanced budgets. And, you know, there's basically a cliff that we're going to fall off of here in the next couple of years with all this federal money that was tied to recovery from the pandemic. All that has to be spent by the end of next year. So a lot of that is going away. And we're talking about billions of dollars, you know, somewhere between probably $6 to $8 billion. So they've been buoyed by that. And really, once the federal funding goes away, once

we're out of this shock of new sales tax revenue increases and things get flat or even might decline, then we're going to see there's going to be some tough decisions to make. I suspect that there's enough uncertainty in the future that maybe these folks don't really know exactly what things are going to look like in a few years. Great. I know you continue to dig in there and see where that money's going and whether it's being spent properly on behalf of the taxpayers. Jared, thank you for joining us, and we'll probably talk about this more in the future.

Sounds great. Thanks, Art.