By Bill Bergman, Truth in Accounting, includes “Illinois has a notorious reputation for criminal convictions of elected government officials.  But government corruption can be accomplished legally as well as illegally.  They both matter, in turn, for the quality of life for residents and taxpayers. A recent study published by the Edmond Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University ranked the 50 states on both “legal corruption” and “illegal corruption.”  

… With the State Data Lab website we’ve developed at Truth in Accounting, we can take a look at how these “corrupt” states stack up against others on a variety of outcomes that matter, including economic growth, state financial conditions, and trust in government. 

… Bottom line, corrupt states have had higher deterioration in their unemployment rates, higher declines in their relative “quality of life,” lower trust in state government, fewer truly “balanced budgets,” higher Taxpayer Burdens as calculated by Truth in Accounting, and higher outmigration. And Illinois’s results are particularly gruesome, within the “corrupt states” category.  For all six of these measures, Illinois ranks either the worst, or close to the worst, for all seven “corrupt” states. …”

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