Governor Pritzker signed the most punitive digital asset tax in the country this month, a two-tenths of one percent levy on crypto transactions including transfers between personal wallets, which the Crypto Council for Innovation called unprecedented in its scope. He also issued a pause on tax incentives for data center development, citing the need to protect working families and local communities from the rapidly expanding industry, language that mirrors the same factually unsupported claims about data centers driving up electricity costs that AOC and other progressive figures have been making nationally.
Mark Glennon, founder of Wirepoints, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to assess what these moves reveal about how Illinois actually makes policy and the accelerating pace of business departure from the state.
Glennon said the data center pause perfectly illustrates how Illinois governs: by reaction rather than deliberation. Over a four-year period ending in 2024, Illinois taxpayers put approximately one billion dollars in subsidies into twenty-seven data center projects because the governor had the discretion to use technology slush funds and economic development tools as he saw fit, and at the time data centers were fashionable. Now that public sentiment has shifted, Pritzker reverses course and puts a hold on the same kind of projects he was subsidizing months earlier. He said this is no way to make policy on genuinely complex questions that will shape the state’s economic future for decades.
On the crypto tax, Glennon noted that it was openly described by Democratic legislators in op-ed form as a response to Elon Musk becoming a trillionaire, with the stated intention of preventing similar concentrations of wealth. He said the legal challenges to this and the broader suite of new taxes signed into law this session are serious and well-documented, and the interim chaos of businesses trying to determine what they actually owe while the litigation plays out will drive additional departures from the state.
He contrasted Illinois’s approach with the vision described by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who leads the most valuable company in the world by market cap at five trillion dollars. Huang argued in a recent interview that the AI revolution presents the United States with a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reindustrialize through a fundamentally new category of manufacturing, data centers and AI infrastructure, that requires new skills, new factories, and new companies in a way that allows American industry to leapfrog competitors rather than trying to recapture industries that have been operating overseas for decades. Glennon said Illinois is ideally situated for exactly this kind of reindustrialization given its central location, transportation infrastructure, and workforce, but that the state’s political leadership has no interest in or capacity for the kind of serious policy thinking that seizing the opportunity would require.
On the pace of business departures, Glennon cited Brian Costin of Americans for Prosperity Illinois, whose research shows the flight has accelerated from roughly seventy to ninety companies per year over the last decade to approximately one hundred fifty to two hundred fifty per year currently, a rate of about four companies per week relocating to other states. Glennon said the dynamic extends beyond the high-profile Chicago-area departures that generate headlines. He cited Johnsonville Foods shutting down its plant in Momence last year and moving operations to Kansas and Wisconsin, putting 275 people out of work. In a small community like Momence, that is devastating in a way that does not register in metropolitan Chicago, and towns like it across Illinois can follow the trajectory of Rockford, Danville, and Galesburg into prolonged decline very quickly.
He said the fear for any business operating in Illinois is that there is no way to predict which industry will become the next target of what he called a socialist wave of public sentiment. The governor’s demonstrated pattern of subsidizing an industry when it is fashionable and then turning against it when the political winds shift means no business can make long-term investment decisions with any confidence about the regulatory and tax environment it will face.
For comparison, Proft cited Florida’s fiscal record under DeSantis: a state budget that has shrunk in real dollars for four consecutive years, now less than half the size of New York’s despite having approximately the same population, a rainy day fund triple the size it was seven years ago, no income tax, no estate tax, a soaring population, and a pending property tax proposal to exempt the first $250,000 of assessed valuation. Illinois’s budget under Pritzker has grown from approximately thirty-four billion to fifty-seven billion dollars while the state’s population has been flat or declining. Glennon said that comparison illustrates what growth-oriented governance can accomplish and what the absence of it costs, and that the long-term consequences of the divergence for the country are extraordinary.