Cook County’s “pilot” experiment in guaranteed basic income is now permanent—a development no one familiar with Illinois governance will find surprising. As AM560’s Morning Answer host Dan Proft noted in his weekly conversation with Wirepoints.org founder Mark Glennon, “Nothing is so permanent as a pilot program in Cook County.”
The county’s two-year, no-strings-attached Guaranteed Income Pilot—funded with $42 million in federal COVID relief dollars—paid 3,250 low-income households $500 per month. That trial phase is now over. The Cook County Board, in a unanimous vote, approved $7.5 million for a permanent version of the program, making it one of the nation’s first standing universal basic income (UBI) systems at the county level.
And county officials are calling it a “historic success.”
Glennon isn’t buying it.
A Program Built on Dependency, Not Mobility
The county’s cheering section includes activists such as Economic Security Illinois’ Sarah Saeed Desri, who declared the pilot “a historic success” based largely on the feedback of the recipients themselves—a method Proft lampooned.
“Imagine surveying people about whether they enjoy receiving free money and then concluding scientifically that the program works,” he joked.
Glennon emphasized that Cook County’s design maximizes dependency: recipients do not face work requirements, and—thanks to a 2023 rule change from Gov. J.B. Pritzker—the payments do not count as income when determining eligibility for other benefits such as SNAP, Medicaid, and cash assistance.
That creates a dynamic where a household can simultaneously collect multiple welfare benefits without losing any by receiving the new guaranteed income.
“You are deliberately torpedoing any logic in the welfare system,” Glennon said. “You’re normalizing government dependency in the middle of a tax crisis.”
Academic Research Confirms the Obvious
While Cook County officials promote the program based on participant sentiment, actual economic research paints a different picture.
Proft cited a University of Toronto experiment evaluating unconditional cash transfers. The findings were predictable:
- Labor participation fell by two percentage points
- Recipients worked fewer hours per week
- Total income excluding the stipend fell by about $1,500 per year
- There was no increase in educational advancement or human-capital investment
- The largest measurable change was more time spent on leisure
“Only downsides,” Proft summarized. “You’re subsidizing not working.”
Meanwhile, Cook County Residents Are Being Taxed Out of Their Homes
The conversation shifted to the real-time fiscal pressure facing homeowners and small businesses in Chicago and the surrounding county. Residents from neighborhoods like North Lawndale, Englewood, and West Garfield Park—areas hit hardest by soaring reassessments—held a press conference this week warning they can no longer afford to stay.
One retiree in North Lawndale said he had taken a rideshare job simply to afford the latest increase. A business owner in West Garfield Park said she’s now staring at two unaffordable bills—one due December 15 and another due March 1.
“These people don’t have the money,” Glennon said. “And yet county leadership is celebrating permanent expansion of a program that gives out free cash with no connection to employment or upward mobility.”
Proft pressed whether this might trigger a political realignment, noting that both poor and middle-class residents—of every race—are being driven out.
Glennon agreed: “We may have a moment here. When people get a property tax bill that threatens their home, that’s a shock of reality.”
A Political Class Hostile to Law Enforcement
Proft closed by raising a separate incident reported by Chicago Contrarian: Park District Superintendent and self-described socialist Carlos Ramirez-Rosa denied placement of a permanent K-9 statue honoring fallen police officer Eduardo Marmolejo—just days before the unveiling. The event had been planned months in advance and approved by CPD and the family.
“It’s a kick in the teeth to a family who lives in perpetual grief,” Proft said. “It reflects the ruling class’s true attitude toward police.”
Glennon had not seen the story, but noted it fits a pattern: “There’s a general hostility toward law enforcement that is rampant in government leadership—not among the public, but among the people who keep getting elected.”
An Illinois Story in Two Directions
The episode laid out two starkly divergent paths:
- For political leadership: more welfare programs, no reform of structural tax problems, and continued erosion of public order.
- For everyday residents: higher property taxes, rising fear of crime, and shrinking options for remaining in their neighborhoods.
Proft ended the conversation with a familiar theme: Illinois’ problems are not mysterious. They are the result of deliberate policies and the politicians who enact them.
And as Glennon noted, those policies continue largely because much of the media refuses to report the consequences.
“When the press ignores these issues, people live in a fictional world,” he said. “But when they open that tax bill, fiction ends.”