Rich Miller

I spent some time talking with a top legislative budget negotiator last week who said rank-and-file legislators will very soon have to come to terms with a state budget environment unlike anything many have ever seen before. The “budgeteer” didn’t know yet how things would shake out, but the person was adamant that weak revenues […]

As you likely know by now, a federal jury deadlocked last week on all three corruption charges against Sen. Emil Jones III, D-Chicago. U.S. District Judge Andrea Wood declared a mistrial after polling individual jurors and arriving at the conclusion that they could not possibly reach a verdict. When you think of the Chicago U.S. […]

Gov. JB Pritzker said last week that the extreme uncertainty with the U.S. government and the international economy might mean that the legislature may have to reconvene to reconfigure the state budget after it adjourns at the end of next month. “It may very well be that we’re going to have to come back at […]

The Civic Federation, the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, the Illinois Economic Policy Institute and the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability recently released a report calling for the expansion of the sales tax to several services, claiming such a move could raise $2 billion for the state. The state imposes an additional sales tax […]

Advocates say a major storm is brewing that could overwhelm the state’s child foster care system. The problem is legal liability insurance, or, more specifically, the lack thereof. Insurance companies, advocates and providers say, are not taking on new private foster care agencies as clients and some agencies are being notified that they’re losing their […]

The latest report from the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability shows that spending on four core state services in the governor’s proposed Fiscal Year 2026 budget will be 9.1% less in real dollars than it was way back in Fiscal Year 2000. Those four core services are education, health care, human services and public […]

Illinois House Speaker Chris Welch didn’t sound all that enthused about passing any new ethics reforms during an interview last week. In the wake of former House Speaker Michael Madigan’s conviction on 10 felony counts earlier this month, I asked Speaker Welch if he believed Madigan’s conviction called out for new reform laws. “I didn’t […]

Mike Madigan knew for a very long time that the U.S. Attorney’s office and the FBI badly wanted to put his head on a spike. It was no secret. Everybody knew it. Madigan was investigated over and over again, but nothing ever came of it. “This was a guy they wanted to go after, and […]

Gov. JB Pritzker has “revised” his remarks about not raising taxes to balance the budget. “It’s very important that we live within our means in this state, and that we not resort to tax increases as a way to, you know, to balance the budget,” Pritzker said on Jan. 30. Last week, when I asked […]

To many Statehouse types, some of last week’s news out of Washington, D.C., felt eerily familiar. On Jan. 27, the White House announced a sweeping new policy that would’ve at least temporarily defunded trillions of dollars of government spending on everything from the National School Lunch Program, to Head Start, to cancer and sleep disorders […]