When a Study Says You're the Problem (And It’s Lying)
How One Study Tries to Flip the Illinois “Taker” Narrative With Broken Math and Even Worse Assumptions
The other day, I made a TikTok calling bullshit on a common narrative I kept hearing: ‘Chicago’s property taxes are carrying the rest of Illinois on their back’. It’s one of those things people say with such confidence, you’d think there was actual data behind it. There isn’t. So I pulled the receipts and showed that in most of Illinois local property taxes are what cover a good chunk, usually the majority, of school funding. The state picks up the rest. Nobody’s getting bailed out by Chicago’s property tax bill.
But someone in the comments told me to look into PTELL - Illinois’s tax cap system - and how it affects school funding. So I did. And when I did, I actually found a scenario from the 1990s to roughly 2017 under the old funding model where, yes, Chicago really screwing over the rest of the state by complete accident.
I pointed that out, and someone (who comments quite frequently about how rural people are leeches) rushed in to defend them. They came back at me with a stat-laden reply about how downstate counties supposedly take more from the state than they give, rattling off numbers like: “For every dollar St. Clair sends to Springfield, it gets $1.13 back. Clinton gets $2.42. Chicago only gets 80 cents.”
I had seen these stats before, and they seemed legit enough. Now, to be fair, they have seemed legit strictly because I assume that Chicago contributes more than they take, simply based on the nature of how economic activity functions in life. However, this time they linked the source of this narrative, the Belleville News-Democrat.
So I clicked it. Then I pulled the full “study” behind it.
And this article is the result of that.
Because while I appreciate a good counterpoint, and love me some good data, this one? This one is the opposite of ‘good’. This is part of the exact attitude that keeps this whole system broken. And if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll know I’m not here to play favorites between the city and the country. I’m here to drag the policy failures into the light, and that starts with calling out the fake "balance sheet" politics that people love to throw around when the real problems run way deeper.
What the Study Claims
The central claim of the study is deceptively simple: Downstate Illinois receives more in state spending than it contributes in tax revenue, while the suburbs - and to a lesser extent, Cook County - subsidize the rest of the state. The authors assert that this disproves the long-standing narrative that Chicago siphons tax dollars away from rural Illinois. But that conclusion rests on a narrowly scoped methodology and a selective interpretation of what counts as “spending,” “taxing,” and “fairness.”
Purpose and Premise
The study attempts to resolve what it calls a “major disconnect between perception and reality” in Illinois public finance. It positions itself as a corrective to what the authors frame as widespread “rural resentment”; the belief, particularly prevalent Downstate, that Chicago receives more than its fair share of resources. The authors explicitly aim to contrast that sentiment with empirical data to “set the record straight.”
They frame this around the 2015–2017 state budget impasse and the broader partisan divide in Illinois. There’s heavy emphasis on public opinion surveys showing that voters in all regions (rural, suburban, and urban) believe they’re being shortchanged. The authors view this as irrational, driven by perception rather than fact, and then set out to prove that the resentment (particularly rural resentment) is misplaced.
Methodology (and Its Limits)
The study relies primarily on a 2015 report by the Illinois Legislative Research Unit (LRU) that used 2013 tax and budget data. This report tried to trace 80% of state revenue and 71% of state expenditures to all 102 counties.
The authors attempt to compensate by adjusting the ratios to account for the incomplete data, using a formula where a raw ratio of 0.89 indicates rough break-even after the 71%/80% traceable gap. They then compute “adjusted ratios” for each region:
Suburbs: 0.53
Cook County: 0.90
Downstate (overall): 1.69
with Southern IL reaching 2.81
According to this calculation, Downstate counties, especially in the southernmost region, receive more than twice the amount in services than they contribute in taxes.
The implication: Downstate’s complaints about being “drained” by Chicago are factually upside-down. If anything, it’s suburban Illinois that’s getting the worst deal.
Narratively Framed
The ‘research’ is framed as a battle between perception (irrational, emotional, populist) and reality (data-driven, expert-informed). It casts political resentment and anti-Chicago sentiment as outgrowths of “Trumpism,” “rural populism,” and the influence of “fake news,” drawing comparisons to Brexit and other global trends. The subtext throughout is that Downstate voters simply don’t understand where their benefits come from, and political elites have exploited that resentment for decades.
While largely a sentiment I agree with, the fact is that framing choice isn't neutral. It loads the study with a particular kind of cultural judgment: one that paints rural distrust as irrational and urban restraint as evidence of enlightenment. It assumes shared agreement about what counts as “benefit,” and doesn’t meaningfully ask whether the kinds of state spending received in poorer regions, like prisons, Medicaid, or state university salaries, are actually helping residents build wealth, autonomy, or long-term economic mobility.
Key Takeaways from the Authors
Illinois is deeply polarized by geography, ideology, and regional resentment—but public perceptions are not backed by spending data.
Suburban counties are the fiscal donors, paying more in taxes than they get in services.
Downstate counties are net recipients, especially Southern Illinois, which sees state spending equal to 19.9% of total regional income.
Cook County breaks roughly even, paying in slightly more than it receives.
Voter perception is untethered from financial reality, and this misalignment hinders the creation of rational, evidence-based fiscal policy.
A Study Built to Prove a Point, Not to Understand One
Let’s start here: I don’t think the authors of this study were trying to lie. I think they were trying to prove a point. When you set out to prove a point instead of understand the problem, your research starts getting a little... stretchy. You can find examples of this in most undergraduate political science papers.
That’s what happened here. They picked a frame, “everyone thinks Downstate is getting screwed, but actually it’s Chicago and the suburbs”, and then they hunted for a methodology that would deliver that result. They didn’t actually build a model of how money works in Illinois. They built a model of how to make Downstate look like a moocher while making Chicago look like a martyr. Then they hit “publish.”
I’m not even saying the general political vibe they’re pushing is wrong. It’s true that rural resentment has been weaponized into some absolute garbage takes. But this study doesn’t actually disprove those takes, it just sidesteps the real complexity to land the exact headline its authors wanted, and if anything appears to have created an inverse poison. The conclusion is baked into the structure. It’s not a discovery. It’s a setup.
So let’s look at one of the biggest missing pieces of that setup: pensions.
The Pension Black Hole
Here’s something the study just conveniently forgets to mention in its findings: about 20% of Illinois’s entire general fund budget went toward public pensions. You know, those things people scream about every election cycle. Those things the state has mismanaged for decades and is still paying the price for.
Guess what the study does with that spending?
Nothing. It leaves it out. Entirely, intentionally, and methodologically. Not a dime of that pension payout money gets counted as "expenditure" in their model.
Which is extra weird because contributions into the pension system, through income taxes, do get counted. So if you’re working in Chicago and paying taxes on your paycheck, or retired and paying income tax out of your pension, those contributions are listed as revenue for the state. But that expenditure for a retired school secretary collecting a monthly pension from that same system? Nope. Not counted. Doesn’t exist.
This was on purpose.
Why?
Because based on the data they had, they would’ve had to assign the entire expenditure to pension headquarters (cities such as Chicago, and Springfield).
And this matters a lot, because retirees don’t all stay in the same county where they worked. People move. People die. People draw pensions across county lines all the time. Some areas might be propped up almost entirely by retirement income. But the model acts like that spending isn’t “real” because it’s not a direct budget appropriation. It’s nonsense. But it’s the kind of nonsense that lets the authors avoid showing the massive financial role pensions play in economies, and how state spending might actually be supporting those economies more than they’re willing to admit.
So right out of the gate, we’re not looking at a full picture. We’re looking at a spreadsheet with a big hole in the middle of it, shaped exactly like the outcome the authors were trying to avoid.
The Revenue Gaps That Hide Downstate’s Role
Let’s talk about what got included… and what got memory-holed.
The study bases its entire revenue-side analysis on just two tax categories: individual income tax and corporate income tax. That’s it. These are the only sources considered when determining who’s paying their “fair share” into the state. No sales tax. No motor fuel tax. No vehicle registration fees. No toll revenues. Nothing that touches the transportation, agriculture, or retail logistics sectors, which, surprise surprise, happen to be concentrated in rural and border counties.
By sticking to income taxes alone, the study effectively scrubs out entire industries and regions from the balance sheet; the areas where tax value is created by the mile, not the paycheck, ended up looking like deadbeats in a system they help keep running.
It’s a rigged lense, and it gets worse.
Even when the authors acknowledge that 20% of their revenue data is “unknown”, and that some of that unknown data comes from corporate taxes, they decide to just distribute it using the same pattern as individual income tax. The taxes they did include were allocated based on the city in which the corporate headquarters existed. So a company that operates entirely in Southern Illinois but is incorporated in Chicago gets fully counted as a Chicago contribution. The workers, the land, the infrastructure? Invisible. Gone. Erased by the magic math of headquarters-based attribution.
That assumption, that corporate taxes “follow” the same geographic distribution as individual income, is lazy at best. At worst, it’s an active distortion of how downstate economies function and how they actually generate value. It’s a spreadsheet trick dressed up as science.
The Mirage of Fiscal Virtue
This next part might be my favorite - the moral math.
According to the study, if a region pays more in taxes than it receives in services, it’s a “donor.” If it receives more than it pays, it’s a “taker.” Simple, right?
Except… no. Not simple. Not remotely.
The study makes zero adjustment for the state’s flat tax structure - the very thing that makes income taxes so misleading in a regional comparison. When Cook County shows higher income tax contributions, it’s not because they’re nobly volunteering more into the pot. It’s because their median income is higher than the southern region of the state. They have more wealth. Of course they’re contributing more in raw dollars.
The problem is, the study treats that number as a virtue. As if higher tax payments reflect generosity or discipline, while higher spending in poorer regions reflects dependence or waste.
Once again, just complete nonsense. It’s statistical framing that only works if you completely ignore the structural differences that shape regional economies. A flat tax, by definition, doesn’t account for ability to pay. And yet the study treats those numbers like a scoreboard of who’s “carrying the load.”
But public goods aren’t about merit. They’re about need. That’s why schools, Medicaid, and roads exist in every part of the state, not just the rich ones. So when this study drops its “net contributor” and “net taker” chart, what it’s really doing is polishing a political narrative in fiscal drag.
It’s not measuring fairness. It’s just validating wealth.
Adjustments That Always Protect the Right People
If you’re looking for the part where the authors admit the data has holes, it’s buried in their discussion of “adjusted ratios.” They confess that they were only able to trace 80% of revenue and 71% of expenditures, which, to be honest, is already a major red flag if you’re about to make sweeping claims about fairness.
But instead of acknowledging that as a fatal limit, they smooth over the gaps with math voodoo. They build “adjusted” give/get ratios by simply applying the same known patterns to the unknown parts. They redistribute untraceable spending the same way as traceable spending. They make the corporate taxes follow the path of personal income taxes. They treat general fund spending like it mirrors special fund spending. In short: every time the numbers go missing, they just fill in the blanks with a guess that happens to reinforce their core conclusion.
Downstate is a taker, and Chicago is a giver.
So when the real-world numbers come back too messy to prove it, they don’t rethink the model, they just tweak the assumptions until the math says what they wanted it to say.
It’s not subtle. It’s engineered.
They admit they couldn’t trace pensions, but at the time, they made up nearly 20% of the state budget. That’s not a rounding error. That’s a fifth of the financial picture that was scrubbed from the equation because allocating it would have “complicated” the narrative. It would have required asking questions about where pensioners live, how benefits circulate through the economy, and what it means to exclude a massive recurring liability from a fairness audit.
So they just didn’t. They left it out.
That’s not objectivity. That’s message control.
The Bigger Problem: Building Resentment With Bad Data
Here’s the real damage.
This wasn’t just a flawed study. It was a political performance dressed up like research, and it’s exactly the kind of thing that keeps Illinois stuck in the dumbest possible version of its own problems.
The whole purpose of the paper was to investigate whether Southern Illinois attitudes about Chicago being a drain on the rest of the state had any merit. But instead of honestly answering that question, the authors just flip the claim around and go, “Actually you’re the freeloader,” while holding up a government-sourced spreadsheet full of assumptions as if it’s gospel.
They’re not challenging perception with better data. They’re just weaponizing a different kind of selective bullshit, then pretending it’s a public service.
It’s dishonest. It’s condescending. And it’s despicable.
Because here’s what actually happens when you circulate this kind of fake-balanced garbage: you harden the very divisions you claim to be healing. People in rural counties, who already feel ignored, dismissed, and overburdened, see this kind of glossy chart-waving and hear what you’re really saying: “Shut up. Be grateful. You’re lucky we fund you at all.”
And people in the suburbs and cities, already tired of hearing about their “privilege” while their own property taxes skyrocket, take that same study and say, “See? We’re carrying the whole damn state.”
Ohhh, the validation.
Congratulations. Now everyone thinks they’re getting screwed. And nobody trusts the data.
Meanwhile, the real problem - the actual brokenness of Illinois education funding, pension management, and regional economic decay - keeps going. Unchanged. Untouched. Because instead of having a useful debate about structure, we’re busy flinging fake morality at each other using maps colored in by guesswork.
That’s the cost of bad data: it starts bad conversations. And bad conversations are exactly what the people who profit off dysfunction want us to have.
This study is no better than the rural resentment it criticizes. It builds its own version of myth, only this time the myth is that the suburbs are saints and everyone else is a sponge. It uses the appearance of rigor to dress up opinion. And then it pretends that calling people irrational is the same as understanding them.
If you wanted to prove that resentment drives politics more than reality, congratulations - this study is now Exhibit A.
Closing Thoughts
I’m hoping the next few days I can get back to the real shit: the house, the insurance, the hours of cleanup and labor tracking, the police reports, the lawsuit prep, the complaints against Indianapolis - all of it. That mountain isn’t going anywhere, and honestly, I’ve been feeling like garbage. Somewhat shut down, but I don’t know what’s going on health-wise.
So instead of knocking out drywall or fighting with a claims adjuster, I’ve been doing deep dives into tax and education policy in a state I don’t even plan to live in. Illinois is where I’ve found myself for now, not where I’m staying, but if you’re gonna be stuck in an environment, you might as well learn how the machine runs. Same thing I did for Indiana when they decided to sue me for a car I have nothing to do with.
What’s clear to me is this: the attitudes aren’t regional. The blame game isn’t just southern Illinois vs. Chicago, or red counties vs. blue cities. It’s everywhere. People across the country have been trained to hate some “other” version of themselves, and none of that hatred ever seems to reach the people who are actually steering the ship off the cliff. What we’re left with is propaganda like this study. Glossy data with rotted math inside. An official-sounding document that’s just another chapter in the same tired novel: “You should be mad at your neighbor, not your government.”
I wrote up a short rebuttal to this thing, not because I had any desire to get back into policy work, but because this one irritated me enough to do it and send it out. If you’re curious, it’s here:
I don’t need to be a policy guy to smell bullshit. And I’m not gonna stop calling it out when I do. Maybe I’ll post more of this kind of thing. Maybe I won’t. But if nothing else, at least we’ve got one more hole patched in the leaky boat of public narratives.
Stay skeptical.