Illinois State Capitol by Daniel Schwen is licensed under CC 4.0
As the 2026 legislative session begins, Illinois Democrats are already confronting a major challenge: a $2.2 billion budget deficit. And, as always, their first suggestion is to raise taxes.
Yet even higher taxes will not fix Illinois’s problems. The issue is not a lack of revenue, but rampant spending by Democratic leaders and an ever-expanding government. Over the past several years, lawmakers have dramatically increased spending, expanding the state budget by roughly $15 billion. Rather than exercising restraint when revenues were strong, Democrat leaders chose to expand government. And again, they want taxpayers to bail them out.
The largest proponent of higher taxes is House Speaker Chris Welch. Despite claiming that this should be a year focused on affordability, Welch has called for a new “millionaire tax” that would subject high-income earners to an even higher tax rate. He has argued that the surcharge as an “easy” solution to Illinois’s budget challenges, while ignoring the reckless spending from the left, and the reality that high-income taxpayers already contribute a disproportionately large share of the state’s income tax revenue.
Republican leaders swiftly rejected any proposal to raise taxes. ”Under him, over the last five years, our budget, it’s gone from $40 billion to $55 billion. So, I don’t really know what affordability means to me. One thing that it cannot mean, and I don’t think it will mean in a campaign year, is increase in taxes,” said Illinois House Republican Leader Tony McCombie.
McCombie also highlighted the fundamental contradiction in the proposal: raising taxes is the opposite of improving affordability for Illinois families.
The untold story of a so-called millionaire tax is that it rarely delivers what politicians promise. In states nationwide, these taxes fail to produce stable revenue and instead drive away the very taxpayers that democratic lawmakers depend on. Massachusetts recently saw a whopping $4.28 billion in taxable income leave the state between 2020 and 2021, after adopting a millionaire tax. In addition, California has lost over 4,000 top-bracket taxpayers from 2013 to 2020, leaving a significant dent in the 185,000 households of high earnerswho already supply about 45% of California’s personal income tax revenue. When the individuals who produce a crucial amount of income tax revenue leave because of a raise in taxes, states lose money.
Illinois’s flat income tax has long provided stability, predictability, and fairness by treating every dollar of income the same, regardless of who earns it. Abandoning the state’s flat tax would make Illinois’s budget more dependent on a small cohort of high earners, exposing state revenues to greater volatility while discouraging investment, job creation, and entrepreneurship. History shows that once the door to graduated income taxes is opened, rates inevitably creep downward to hit more taxpayers. Illinois does not suffer from a revenue shortage; it suffers from chronic overspending. Destroying the flat tax to paper over fiscal mismanagement would only make the state less competitive, less affordable, and more reliant on the very taxpayers most capable of leaving.
