The northwest suburb of Barrington passed an ordinance to allow local businesses to forgo Cook County’s minimum wage hike, which has the potential to be devastating for jobs in the county.
Workers’ compensation is a significant cost to Illinois taxpayers and drains scarce tax dollars from government coffers. Political and business leaders often view workers’ compensation as a costly regulation that affects private-sector investment and employment in Illinois.[1] This description is accurate yet incomplete. The same heavy costs imposed on private-sector employers[2] are also imposed on...
Millennial out-migration from the Land of Lincoln is worse than all its neighboring states.
Since the beginning of 2015, Illinois has lost 14,100 manufacturing jobs.
New Airbnb regulations pose a serious problem for Chicagoans.
A repeal of the federal estate tax would make it imperative that Illinois get rid of its own state death tax to avoid losing even more residents and income to other states.
Illinois may soon be surrounded by Right-to-Work states.
New IDES data show that Illinois’ overall jobs growth was weak for October. While the greater Chicago area had tepid jobs growth over the year, the rest of the state lost jobs.
Metropolitan jobs data show that from September 2015 – September 2016 the greater Chicago area is up approximately 49,000 jobs, while the rest of the state is down 6,000 jobs.
Since the end of the recession, only 5 out of Illinois’ 13 metro areas – Carbondale-Marion, Chicago, Kankakee, Lake County-Kenosha County and Springfield – have recovered all the private-sector jobs lost from the Great Recession.
Airbnb has reported that about 4,800 Chicagoans are Airbnb hosts, and they earn an average of $5,300 per year renting out their homes through the service.
More than 6,000 Illinois manufacturing jobs disappeared in 2015.
IRS data show the average income of taxpayers leaving Illinois surpassed the average income of taxpayers entering the state by $20,000 in 2014, a record loss for Illinois in the wake of the 2011 income-tax hike.
An otherwise ordinary fall day turned joyous on Sept. 24, 2015. Dozens of food-cart street vendors rallied at Chicago City Hall to show support for an ordinance that would legalize the vendors’ trade. Approximately 1,500 food carts – beloved by their communities in Chicago’s predominantly Hispanic neighborhoods – had operated in an underground economy for...