By John Klingner -
President Barack Obama visited to Galesburg last week to give a speech in which he said he would refocus on jobs and the economy.
That’s little comfort for the unemployed workers in cities across Illinois. The economic policies the president wishes to enact at the federal level have been at work for years in his home state of Illinois, and they have resulted in a new normal: high unemployment.
The latest seasonally adjusted unemployment numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics for June continue the trend of poor employment for Metropolitan Statistical Areas, or MSAs, revealing a poor job market across Illinois.
For many cities, the last year has been one of scarce job creation. Springfield and the Bloomington-Normal area saw their unemployment rate drop only 0.3 and 0.1 percent respectively over the past year.
Other cities such as Chicago and Danville have seen their unemployment rates rise by 0.6 of a percentage point while Peoria increased by 0.9 percentage points. The Decatur area saw the worst year-over-year change, with its unemployment rate increasing to 11.5 percent.
Two other MSAs other than Decatur have unemployment rates above 10 percent: Danville and Rockford.
In the Chicago MSA alone, more than 430,000 workers remain unemployed in addition to the 170,000 across the rest of the state. In total, more than 1 million workers remain unemployed and underemployed in Illinois.
If the state could even reach the national unemployment rate of 7.6 percent, nearly 100,000 of those unemployed Illinoisans could be working.
If opportunities continue to elude workers in Illinois, they’ll look elsewhere – just as many have already done. Illinois has already lost, on net, nearly one person every 10 minutes over the past 15 years.
To restore true prosperity to Illinois, the state will need to do more than just refocus on the economy as the president suggested. Illinois must overturn the failed policies it’s been following over the past decade and embrace pro-growth and pro-job policies.
Illinois can do that by lowering its corporate income tax rate to encourage business investment, reducing onerous and costly regulations that stifle entrepreneurship, and passing labor reforms to make Illinois a more attractive business destination.
Enacting these polices would go a long way toward putting Illinoisans back to work.
John Klingner is Policy Research Assistant at the Illinois Policy Institute
