wallethub

Last week, I'm sure that I brightened your day considerably by pointing out that Illinois residents are lucky enough to be paying the 2nd highest property taxes in the entire country (right behind New Jersey).

With election season rolling around, chances are you won't see many incumbents featuring that fun fact in their campaign commercials, since our stunningly high tax rates are what's driving people out of Illinois to begin with.

Everyone in the state of Illinois with a Social Security number is at risk for having their identity stolen, but two age groups get targeted aggressively and seemingly endlessly---the very young and the very old.

It's pretty much a given that on nearly anyone's list of life's priorities, safety and security is right up there at the top of the list next to health. The home monitoring/home security business is booming for a reason.

I once saw a person get up and leave a live comedy show, saying that they "didn't feel safe there" because the headlining comedian had behaved inappropriately in his private life. Not feeling safe because of that struck me as being far more unreasonable than not feeling safe where you live.

Good news if you're living the veg life here in Illinois.

Turns out Illinois is a great place to be an educator.

Working hard or hardly working?

If you've lived here in Illinois for any significant length of time, you already know that you're paying a lot in taxes of all sorts. But did you know that our state was taking this much from you?

Looking at the results of a recently-published study on the most and least educated cities in the United States reminded me of a couple of quotes. One, from John Belushi in Animal House: "7 years of college down the drain," and the other from my dad: "Did 9 years of high school teach you nothing?"