Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker insists his new record budget was balanced “all without raising taxes on working people.” The fine print tells a very different story.
The $56 billion spending plan the Democrat signed last week — the largest in state history — leans on a sprawling new menu of digital levies that will land squarely on the same working families Pritzker claims to be protecting, RealClearPolitics reports. The broad-based digital taxes, the report notes, are “sure to whack most of the state’s 12.7 million residents.”
The new revenue isn’t headed for a rainy-day fund. The record budget boosts spending on welfare programs, and the new digital levies are how Springfield quietly pays for it — without the political cost of a headline income-tax hike. It is the oldest trick in the book: tax the things voters don’t see itemized on a pay stub.
Start with the first-in-the-nation tax on social media. Platforms with at least 1 million Illinois users will pay up to $6 per user every year; smaller sites pay $1.20. The language is so vague it could rope in Yelp, Nextdoor, even Substack — and the cost of those “free” accounts won’t stay with Silicon Valley for long.
“It turns the internet into more of a ‘walled garden,’ since free accounts become increasingly costly to provide,” the Tax Foundation warned.
Then there’s a 10% gross receipts tax on targeted digital advertising — pitched as a hit on Google, Meta, and TikTok, but destined to be passed straight through to the local taqueria, bike shop, and dry cleaner that buy those ads. It closely mirrors a Maryland digital-ad tax already mired in litigation and appears to run afoul of the federal Internet Tax Freedom Act, which bars discriminatory taxes on digital commerce.
Pritzker didn’t stop at advertising. The budget tacks on a first-of-its-kind 0.2% tax on digital-asset transfers — “Sell $10,000 in Bitcoin, and you will owe $20” — plus a 1.75% tax on sports bets placed through prediction markets and a 15% tax on fantasy-sports operators. Nickel by nickel, the state is reaching into every corner of the modern economy.
Call them what they are: junk taxes. Each one is small enough to wave away on its own, and collectively they let a governor crow about “no new taxes on working people” while quietly draining a little more from every phone, every paycheck, and every backyard side hustle in Illinois. The Maryland fight already shows where this ends — in court, after the bills have gone out.
And the ambition doesn’t stop at the state line. Pritzker is already positioning himself to argue that Illinois policies are the right model for the entire country. So the rest of America should pay close attention to who, exactly, ends up footing the bill. Spoiler: it isn’t the billionaires.
Source: realclearpolitics.com
