Washington is cutting funding. Costs are rising. Critical services are on the line. And Springfield is running out of time to choose a side.
The Trump administration’s cuts to Medicaid, food assistance and public K-12 and higher education will blow a hole in our state budget. For example, Illinois could lose as much as $51 billion in federal Medicaid funding over the next 10 years — fallout from the Republican budget signed by President Donald Trump.
These are the programs that keep families fed, children in school and seniors out of poverty. When Washington walks away from those commitments, the burden doesn’t disappear. It gets pushed onto states, local governments and families. Illinois has already slashed spending on core services by 13% since 2000. We have been doing more with less for a generation.
Without sustainable new state revenue, the required cuts will be real, and they will be brutal: food assistance gone, health care access limited, economic opportunity narrowed and basic needs unmet for the people who can least afford it. At the same time, rising costs on everything from groceries to gas to rent are already squeezing Illinois families.
Illinois has one of the most unfair tax systems in the country. We rank eighth most-regressive among all states, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. It also found that low-income households pay more than double the share of their income in state and local taxes compared to the wealthiest 1%.
Middle-class families’ burden keeps growing while large corporations exploit loopholes to shrink their bills. And when the Millionaire’s Tax Amendment failed to advance in Springfield last month, one of the clearest paths to fixing that imbalance was deferred until at least 2028.
6 tax proposals
The path forward isn’t closed. More than 40 lawmakers in the Affordability and Tax Justice Coalition have identified six proposals that would generate the revenue Illinois needs without asking working people to pay more.
Tax Big Tech’s data profits. Technology corporations are harvesting your personal data and selling it to advertisers for billions. Proposed bills would impose a 10% tax on digital advertising revenue for any corporation making more than $150 million from those ads. This is a tax on the tech giants who have profited enormously from our data while contributing far too little in return.
Cut loose from Trump’s corporate tax giveaways. The federal Republican budget (H.R. 1, also known as the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”) handed corporations new tax loopholes, and because Illinois automatically follows federal tax law, those loopholes became Illinois loopholes too. Bills in the Illinois House and Senate would reclaim revenue that corporations are now pocketing.
Make corporations pay what the law already allows. Illinois’ base corporate income tax rate is 7%. The state Constitution allows it to go up to 7.92%, with no constitutional amendment needed. Bringing the state rate to its constitutional ceiling is the bare minimum.
Tax billionaire wealth, not just billionaire wages. The wealthiest Illinoisans have found a way to avoid income taxes: Don’t take income. Instead, they accumulate wealth through appreciating assets like stocks, real estate and investments that are never taxed until sold.
Two bills would enact a tax on unrealized capital gains, ensuring that billionaires are held to the same income tax expectations as teachers, nurses and construction workers.
Stop the offshore shell game. Large corporations can shuffle profits to subsidiaries in tax havens, reducing what they owe to Illinois taxpayers. Proposed legislation would enact worldwide combined reporting, closing that escape hatch and requiring corporations to account for their global profits honestly.
Close luxury loopholes for millionaires. Illinoisans who earn over $1 million a year pay the flat income tax on just 25.8% of their income, because high earners use credits, deductions and exemptions to shrink their taxable income to a fraction of what they actually earn.
Limiting those loopholes for filers above $1 million would bring a measure of fairness to a system that has long been tilted against ordinary taxpayers.
Social services under pressure
Taken together, these six proposals represent a serious, structural shift toward a tax system that works for everyone, not just those at the top.
We are not asking working families to pay more. We support finding efficiencies and eliminating waste wherever it exists.
The idea that Illinois can cut its way out of this crisis — that gutting services for families already under pressure is somehow the responsible choice — is a fiction. The math doesn’t support it, and it would be deeply irresponsible to force working families to bear the cost of a budget crisis created in large part by the wealthy and large corporations failing to pay their fair share.
The state lawmakers of the Affordability and Tax Justice Coalition are ready to act. We are asking our colleagues in Springfield to join us — and we are asking Illinois residents to demand it.
Washington has made its choice. Now we have to make ours in Springfield.
State Rep. Carol Ammons, D-Urbana, state Sen. Graciela Guzmán, D-Chicago, and state Sen. Dave Koehler, D-Peoria, are members of the Affordability and Tax Justice Coalition.