Lake County Gazette

The president of a conservative nonprofit research group said that Illinois' job losses are linked to COVID-19 and "self-imposed" policies created by the governor.

"There's been disaster all over the country with the way COVID has created havoc," Ted Dabrowski told the Lake County Gazette. "Here in Illinois, it's been worse than in most places. Our lockdowns have been among the most severe in the country. So, you would have to say a lot of this has been self-imposed, coming from the governor running all these executive orders for over a year that have shut businesses down for far too long."

The Prairie State lost approximately 423,000 jobs or nearly 7% of its workforce in 2020, with the declines coming in every metropolitan area, according to an article by Illinois Policy. In Chicago, where unemployment numbers rose the fastest, rates more than tripled over a year-long period ending in December 2020 to 8.7%.

Wirepoints President Ted Dabrowski | Photo Courtesy of Wirepoints

While much of the job losses can be linked to COVID-19, Dabrowski said Springfield's sickness is viral.

"Real change in Illinois starts with pension reform," Dabrowski said. "We can't start to have lower taxes, lower property taxes, without pension reform. Rising pensions are hiking taxes and cutting into core services. Until you change that, people will keep leaving. Right now, we haven't touched any of that, and that means more hard times are ahead and could get worse."

Dabrowski hopes to see lawmakers change the direction of the state.

"The first thing legislators should [have done] is strip Gov. Pritzker of his executive order powers, so there's no way he can do any of this again," he said. "I thought that should have been the first thing they did when they got together in January, but that didn't happen. We need to look at our job creation through the lens of unwinding all these bad laws that hurt what we need to be doing."