THE HAUNTING OF SPRINGFIELD: ILLINOIS’S HALLOWEEN VETO SESSION UNLEASHES 13 NEW TAXES

🎃 The Haunting of Springfield: The Ghost of Tax Hikes Past Returns

By Editor Opinion | October 31, 2025

It was the witching hour in the Land of Lincoln — that eerie hour before dawn when even the Capitol’s marble floors seemed to creak with regret. Through the mist outside the Statehouse, shadows stirred. The ghosts of Illinois’s fiscal past had come calling again, dragging their chains of debt and chanting their favorite spell: “More revenue… more revenue…”

When the gavel finally dropped on Halloween morning, the séance was complete. Lawmakers, cloaked in the dim light of Springfield’s rotunda, conjured a $1.5 billion “lifeline” for Chicago-area transit agencies — the CTA, Metra, and Pace — stitched together with fresh taxes and fees that will haunt Illinois wallets long after the pumpkins rot. The session ended not with applause, but with a hollow cha-ching echoing through the marble halls.

There was no income tax hike this time — only tricks. A billion-dollar tollway surcharge for drivers bound for O’Hare. The resurrection of a 1% grocery sales tax across the Regional Transportation Authority’s six-county domain — even as downstate families thought they’d buried that levy years ago. And for dessert, new hikes on streaming services that will nibble at every movie night. By dawn’s first light, critics had counted at least thirteen new levies — a Baker’s Dozen of Dread — transforming what was billed as a rescue mission into a taxpayer haunting.

👻 The Season of the Levy

For weeks leading up to October 30, the air in Springfield crackled with one word: taxes. Every committee meeting felt like a séance — the familiar circle of faces invoking the spirits of “fairness” and “stability.” Democrats, fortified by supermajorities in both chambers, framed each new fee as a moral necessity to “plug holes” — in transit budgets facing a $200 million cliff, in energy grids groaning under clean-power mandates, in labor protections demanding more revenue.

House Democrats floated a tiered real estate transfer tax that would slap homebuyers with up to $9 per $1,000 on sales over $5 million — a progressive pitch to fund mass transit but one that, critics warned, would ripple pain through ordinary closings. Senate GOP leaders pleaded for restraint, calling it a “tax on steroids” that could squeeze working families already crushed under the nation’s highest property taxes.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker — billionaire builder of Illinois’s $50 billion rainy-day fund — nodded through the fog but balked at the most audacious hikes, like the broad-based sales tax expansion. Still, the ghosts of fiscal temptation whispered in his ear, and their echoes filled the chambers.

💀 The Witching Hour Votes

As midnight bled into morning, the House floor glowed an unholy orange under flickering lights. Exhausted lawmakers shuffled papers like spellbooks. State Rep. Ryan Spain, R-Peoria, captured the malaise as the chamber voted in the wee hours:

“This has been one hell of a veto session... an expensive couple days for taxpayers here with initiatives to increase insurance rates, energy prices, and now a massive sales tax increase... One billion dollar tax increase for the tollway, and a betrayal of trust.”

Outside, the mood curdled. Social media lit up like jack-o’-lanterns, their grins carved in outrage. “JB Prickster is sucking more life out of Illinois with 13 new TAXES!!!” one X user howled. Another called it “legalized theft,” a “criminal cartel” funneling dollars to cronies under the guise of compassion.

Even as the Capitol’s doors slammed shut, lawsuits stirred — spectral complaints over property tax “theft” schemes. Homeowners and counties braced for millions in damages if Springfield didn’t intervene. The ghosts weren’t done; they were merely regrouping.

🕸️ The Vanishing Act of Growth

But amid the tax incantations, something vanished like a specter at sunrise: growth. No talk of luring the next Rivian or Caterpillar back from exile. No blueprint for courting investors or fueling new industries. Illinois, losing 100,000 residents a year, heard crickets on workforce training, innovation hubs, or incentives for the “talent economy” the governor touts in glossy ads.

The grim reaper’s scythe swung close last month: 1,722 mass layoffs in September alone — a fresh wound bleeding through the state’s economic shroud. Capital One’s restructuring carved 392 jobs from Riverwoods, mere months after its merger with Discover turned headquarters into a house of horrors. Chicago suffered another 726 cuts from firms like Spirit Airlines and Weiss Memorial Hospital, while Brookdale Senior Living shuttered shifts for the vulnerable. Suburban Cook County absorbed 45% of the toll; collar counties, another 39%.

Under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, these filings may not be flawless oracles, but they scream a truth from the tomb: Illinois’s business climate is a graveyard, where high taxes — from the nation’s top property rates to the third-highest corporate levies — chase the living before they ever arrive.

⚰️ A Business Owner’s Lament

Meet Mike Ivy, co-owner of Quest Fitness Center in downstate Marion. He’s no partisan phantom — just a flesh-and-blood Illinoisan fighting to keep the lights on. His family-run gym, three generations deep, now faces $1.2 million in annual property taxes that dwarf his payroll.

“Every year, the ghosts come back,” Ivy says. “Taxes up 20% since Pritzker took office? Fine, if it built something. But my trainers are leaving for Austin. Texas added 40,000 jobs last year with incentives we can’t touch because we’re too busy debating grocery surcharges.”

While lawmakers fixated on energy “decoupling” bills that could raise utility rates by shielding power companies from clean-energy costs — a $3 billion hit to ratepayers over a decade — affordability advocates pitched the Clean and Reliable Grid Act as salvation. It promised 6 gigawatts of battery storage and transmission upgrades, potentially sustaining 132,000 clean-energy jobs. Yet when the final votes fell, the package passed in fragments, barely noticed amid the tax fog.

🦇 The Supermajority’s Shadow

Since 2019, Democrats’ supermajority has functioned like a Ouija board permanently stuck on “Yes.” In just two years, they’ve green-lit $7 billion in new spending while Illinois’s GDP crawls below 1% growth. September’s layoff ledger reads like a blood-stained addendum to the veto’s tax treatise.

Governor Pritzker boasts of reversing Republican-era outflows, but when Fox News anchor Bret Baier asked, “Do businesses want to stay in Illinois?” the governor deflected — a magician waving smoke to hide the empty hat. Meanwhile, families like Ivy’s pack U-Hauls, and firms like Capital One prune payrolls under the cloak of night.

🕯️ The Curse of the Familiar

So why, in this haunted ledger of failure — where tax hikes echo like footsteps in an empty mansion — do Illinoisans keep re-summoning the same spirits each election? Perhaps it’s the spell of incumbency: the comfort of a familiar ghost. We clutch our candy corn, whisper our complaints, and vote again for the devils we know.

Is it the siren song of “stability” in stormy seas, or the potion of low-turnout politics that lets ghosts glide unchallenged? Whatever the curse, it binds us to ballots promising pumpkin-spice progress but delivering devilish dues.

🌑 The Dawn After the Haunting

As All Hallows’ Eve fades, Illinois wakes to a treat that tastes like coal dust — a state richer in rhetoric, poorer in promise. Springfield’s leaders summoned spirits of short-term fixes, but the real haunt is what they ignored: the resurrection of growth, jobs, and opportunity.

Until veto sessions conjure innovation over invoices and incentives over increases, the exodus will continue. The ghosts will return next fall, rattling their chains, demanding their due — and the taxpayers of Illinois will once again foot the bill for a haunting they never invited.

⚡ A Call to the Living

If this tale chills your bones, share it. Send it to your legislator. Demand growth agendas at ilga.gov. Vote for exorcists, not enablers — leaders who build, not just bill.

Illinois deserves a resurrection, not another reckoning.