Cartoonist Scott Stantis on Illinois’ dismal 2024 economy. (Scott Stantis/For the Chicago Tribune)
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD | Chicago Tribune
As Chicago Bears President Kevin Warren pushed for a new football stadium on the lakefront, he said that if you look around today’s Chicago, you see a paucity of cranes in the sky. That’s visual evidence of the moribund nature of the Illinois economy.
But it’s yet more bracing to view the Land of Lincoln’s stagnant state of affairs laid out in depressing facts and figures that even the most loyal civic booster cannot dispute.
A recent report from the Illinois Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability provided the unhappy totals. In the first quarter of this year, the state was in the beginnings of a recession. Annualized real gross domestic product in Illinois fell 1.3% in the first three months of 2024 while the nation as a whole generated real GDP growth of 1.4%. That put Illinois in the bottom six among U.S. states on that metric, besting just South Dakota, North Dakota, Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas. Other than Iowa, every state surrounding Illinois managed to generate GDP growth.
Illinois’ woeful record is not just a recent phenomenon. Since the end of 2019, just before the pandemic, Illinois has generated real GDP growth of just 2.8%, badly lagging the nation’s growth in that period of 8.6%. That’s good for 46th in the nation among states.
Employment is much the same. Illinois’ total number of non-farm jobs only recently edged past the state’s total employment just before COVID struck. The nation as a whole has produced 6.2 million more jobs in that time frame. Illinois’ share of that growth is a paltry 14,000, good for 45th among states. Not exactly impressive.
Personal income in Illinois is growing far more slowly than in the U.S. as a whole as well, reflecting in part the state’s well-documented struggles to boost its population.
The report lays the blame for what it bluntly calls a “poor economic performance” mainly on the state’s past fiscal instability, although it does briefly cite “relatively high business taxes” as a possible reason.
Of course, one might think that if the fiscal chaos of the Rauner years were the primary cause of the state’s crummy economic showing, six straight balanced budgets under Gov. J.B. Pritzker and ensuing higher credit ratings would have rendered Illinois’ fiscal management much less of a factor at this point. The state’s economic showing, one might imagine, would have reached at least middle of the pack by now rather than 45th in the nation if that explanation was the root of the problem.
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