study done last year by the think tank State Budget Solutions found that total compensation for Illinois state employees was on average 27 percent higher than their counterparts in the private sector.

Illinois state employees made nearly $4,000 more in wages and $13,000 more in benefits than the private-sector employees.

More than half of Illinois state workers will retire before age 60 with guaranteed state pensions that average more than $42,000 and compound at 3 percent annually.

Public opinion polls vary widely on who’s going to succeed Chicago’s Barack Obama as president, but they agree on one thing: Public confidence in government and its ability to get things done is at record low levels.

The reason is fairly obvious. A weak economy that’s creating jobs but not nearly as much wealth for the average person has lots of folks convinced that “they” are eating our bacon. From Donald Trump on the right to Sen. Bernie Sanders on the left, populism is the current rage as pols try to figure out how to make the case that they are on voters’ side.

Obama never really has pulled off that trick. Though he’s accomplished more than people realize and many in Washington never gave him a fair shot, the former University of Chicago law instructor’s wonky side slips out far too much.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel was accused Friday of punishing middle-class homeowners renting out rooms or their entire homes to supplement their income by slapping a 2 percent surcharge on the AirBNB and other home-sharing services.

“Someone renting out a couch on the South Side of Chicago would be taxed at a higher rate than someone renting out the penthouse at the Four Season Hotel in downtown Chicago,” said Christopher Nulty, a spokesman for home-sharing giant AirBNB.

One-hundred thousand people per year are choosing to leave Illinois, taking their tax dollars with them. That’s wiping out hundreds of millions of dollars from state and local government treasury accounts, according to the Illinois Policy Institute.

“So if you want to really look at why we can’t make a budget work, it’s because so many of our taxpayers now live in Florida, live in Texas, in Indiana, in Arizona and Colorado,” said the institute’s vice president of policy, Michael Lucci.

Census and IRS data show the top reason people are leaving Illinois isn’t the snowy winters. It’s jobs.

A half-dozen friends and acquaintances of the former city official accused of taking bribes to install red light cameras took the witness stand Friday to detail his practice of using wads of cash to pay for everything from rent to plane tickets.

One after another they testified that John Bills — charged with accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash bribes — always paid in cash. He sometimes asked them to use their credit cards or personal checks to cover expenses for him but paid them back with $100 bills.

“He said he was getting a divorce and he asked me for a loan,” said Thomas McCluskey, who said he was a longtime friend. “I gave him a check for $6,000 and that same day he gave me $6,000 in cash.”

Commissioner Richard Boykin’s resolution requesting the U.S. Department of Justice investigate Homan Square, an alleged off-the-books detention center operated by the Chicago Police Department, sailed unanimously through the Cook County Board meeting Wednesday.

Last month U.S. attorney general Loretta Lynch launched a civil rights investigation into Chicago police’s use of force practices. Boykin has advocated to get the Justice Department to expand its probe to include Homan Square. The nondescript warehouse drew national attention and scrutiny when the London-based Guardian newspaper penned a series of articles detailing human rights abuses committed against detainees held at the North Lawndale facility.

Boykin was not surprised by the resolution’s passage, despite concerns fellow commissioners raised last month during a committee hearing on the matter. In that meeting some commissioners questioned whether the county had jurisdiction over the city’s affairs.

Two years after Mayor Rahm Emanuel closed a record 50 schools over low enrollment, officials say they don’t know where many of the computers, desks, books and other items from those buildings ended up.

After being pressed for more than six months on what happened to the classroom equipment, Chicago Public Schools officials now say they don’t have an answer.

In 2015, eight of the organizations in Crain’s annual list of Chicago’s largest employers shrank their local full-time headcount. Only five of them grew that headcount by 5 percent or more.

Crain’s newly published list is ranked by local full-time employees as of Dec. 31. The largest employer remains the U.S. government, reporting 42,887 full-time local employees, a 6.1 percent decrease over 2014. Chicago Public Schools, the city of Chicago, Cook County and Advocate Healthcare round out the top five.

Together, the 25 largest employers in the Chicago area count approximately 357,700 full-time employees working in Cook County and its six surrounding counties. About 43.9 percent of them work for a government agency and 14.6 percent work within a hospital system.