Illinois sky high property taxes 2nd-highest in nation

[linicx]

What is going on is you don't live in Illinois. Cook County, the home to the third largest city in America, is the second largest county in America - surpassed only by LA County and Los Angeles. Cook is one of 102 counties in Illinois. It is the only county that has 50 million visitors every year. Where one senator downstate can represent 8 counties, Cook County elects the vast majority of the legislators in Springfield that represent one or two cities. .

The real estate tax dollars that stay local support schools pre k-university and community colleges, hospitals and EMS, libraries, parks, fire/police, city and county service, sewer and water, city lights, city streets, jails and cemeteries, historical buildings and museums, city buses and city trains, and alleys, stop lights, and stop signs, and city sirens, public walkways, bicycle path and walking path, beach and river print, train station, ports, roads to airports, employees and maintenance such as snow plows, salt and sand, lawn mowers for the parks, city fountains, bandshells, amphitheater,city and county health departments and more. The cost of supporting 8M in 1200 square miles is not cheap.

I lived in some of those "low tax" states. Mortgage, house and car insurance, utilities, and COL is not much different than central Illinois. The health departments are underfunded, and understaffed. Poor sanitation standards; Restaurants and hospitals were dirty, and some of the doctors were not well trained at all. Doctors in ER that could not culture a wound. How would you like a doctor tell you that you have lung cancer because neither he nor the radiologist could identify a thumbprint? Been there; done that; don't wanna go back.

You really will never know how bad the bad can be until you deal with a chronically ill or critically ill 24/7 for a very long time. Luckily IL has some pretty good hospitals and pretty good doctors across the state, and some very good support systems in place, too. .