The Chicago Tribune editorial board expressed concern this week about the deteriorating relationship between Governor JB Pritzker and Mayor Brandon Johnson, suggesting that a healthy and productive working relationship between the two would be essential for Chicago to address its formidable fiscal challenges.
Mark Glennon, founder of Wirepoints, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to offer a rather different perspective on the value of those two working in harmony.
Glennon said the last thing anyone concerned about Illinois should want is Pritzker and Johnson working constructively together. When they have cooperated, the results have included a combined state and city expenditure of roughly three and a half to four billion dollars to attract and house people in the country illegally, providing rental assistance, free healthcare, tuition assistance, and free schooling. He said the Tribune’s suggestion that productive collaboration between a far-left governor and a far-left mayor would produce good outcomes for Chicago reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of what that collaboration actually produces.
The more important story, Glennon said, is the fiscal record that both Pritzker and Lieutenant Governor Juliana Stratton have been marketing as evidence that Illinois is on the right fiscal track, a claim that has been deployed in Stratton’s Senate campaign and Pritzker’s nascent presidential positioning. Glennon said the improvement that exists is not the product of a single meaningful fiscal reform. He challenged anyone to name one structural reform Pritzker has implemented that contributed to Illinois’s improved bond ratings. There is none. What happened instead is that taxpayers were systematically soaked.
The Illinois Policy Institute conducted a detailed accounting of express tax and fee increases under Pritzker, identifying fifty-seven separate state tax and fee increases since he took office in January 2019 that have extracted seventy-seven billion dollars in additional revenue, the majority of which are regressive taxes that fall disproportionately on lower and middle-income residents. That is the first of three buckets in the $162 billion total Wirepoints estimates as additional extraction from taxpayers during Pritzker’s tenure. Glennon said the number can be debated at the margins and may be off by tens of billions in either direction, but the order of magnitude is not seriously in question. The state collected an enormous amount of additional money and produced modest bond rating upgrades while remaining in last place among all fifty states on that metric. Illinois has received multiple bond upgrades under Pritzker and has not moved out of fiftieth place. That is the actual accomplishment.
He noted that a critical piece of the fiscal picture is often forgotten in discussions of Pritzker’s record, which is that the largest tax increase in Illinois history arrived in 2017 when the Democratic legislature passed a budget over Governor Rauner’s veto, adding five billion dollars a year in ongoing revenue. Rauner took responsibility for mishandling the budget impasse, which is fair, but Democrats could have passed a budget at any point during that impasse and chose not to. When Pritzker took office in January 2019, that five-billion-dollar annual revenue stream was already flowing, providing what Glennon called manna from heaven that Pritzker has taken credit for without having generated it.
The long-term fiscal picture is unambiguous. The IRS migration data Wirepoints regularly tracks shows $94 billion in total adjusted gross income lost to other states through out-migration from 2000 through 2023, with the trend accelerating rather than reversing. Pritzker’s own Office of Management and Budget projects a deficit of approximately $5.3 billion by 2031, and Glennon said even that official projection, generated by people with every incentive to present the rosiest possible numbers, will prove to be a significant underestimate. The pension situation, which state officials acknowledged in court filings a decade ago could only be addressed through fundamental reform and which the Illinois Supreme Court has since made nearly impossible to touch, is now twice as bad as it was when those admissions were made. Nobody in Springfield is talking about addressing it.
Glennon said the political incentive structure is straightforward. Pritzker will be gone from the governor’s office before the 2031 cliff arrives, leaving whatever comes next to deal with the accumulated consequences of fifty-seven tax increases, unreformed pensions, and a population base that has been steadily transferring its income and its congressional representation to states with more rational governance. He said the red states will benefit from the ongoing blue state fiscal deterioration as they continue to receive the transplants that Illinois and its peers are driving out, while Illinois withers on the vine.