With Griffin gone, Walmart heir Lukas Walton is now the state’s richest individual, by a long shot. But in a sign he’s cutting ties, Crain’s reported Thursday he’s giving up his seat on the boards of nonprofit and cultural organizations. With some of Citadel’s business staying in Illinois, it remains to be seen how much the billionaire continues to be involved in the state and its politics.
He also leaves behind an Illinois Republican Party that benefited to the tune of over $150 million from his checkbook, including at least $50 million to Aurora Mayor Richard Irvin’s gubernatorial campaign. “The high-income people, when their incomes go up and down or they leave, those states may be relatively more impacted than a state like Illinois, where you and I pay the same income tax rate as he does,” she said.īeyond the tax revenue hit, Griffin has used his largesse to donate huge lump sums to nonprofits, the arts and even to separate and repair Chicago’s Lakefront Trail.
While the graduated income tax would have sent more tax revenue spilling into the state’s piggy bank, the fact that the flat tax remains in place means Illinois’ current tax revenue stream will take less of a hit than other states with a graduated rate, like California, suffer when a wealthy individual moves for greener tax pastures, noted Portman. The graduated tax would have seen top earners be taxed at higher rates-up to 7.99% for all income over $1 million-than those with lower incomes. Pritzker’s graduated income tax initiative-a proposal the governor spent just over $50 million of his own fortune to promote during the campaign. The $54 million outlay was used to defeat Gov. In fact, Griffin spent $54 million in 2020 to ensure that flat rate remained for himself and other wealthy Illinoisans. What we do know is that whatever amount of Griffin’s annual income was available to be taxed by Illinois, it was taxed at a rate of 4.95%. Portman agreed, saying “that’s real money, but it’s not devastating.”īut the tax hit, especially if Griffin takes other top Citadel executives and their fat paychecks with him, is still on the magnitude of dollar amounts politicians regularly cite as a transformational funding source for popular programs or in wasteful spending cut from the annual budget. Losing out on one taxpayer’s loot, even the state’s wealthiest resident, would amount to a “rounding error” in a state with a $46.5 billion budget, said Ralph Martire, executive director of the Center for Tax & Budget Accountability. Still, if the figure amounts to tens of millions, budget and tax experts said the damage done to the state’s budget would be minimal in a state of 12.8 million residents. “It seems likely that someone moving out of the state like that, someone who is well known to be the richest person in the state leaves, at least some of that income that he was earning probably was being taxed from Illinois and now it's lost,” said Carol Portman, president of the Taxpayers’ Federation of Illinois. ProPublica obtained a trove of IRS records and has done extensive reporting on the tax bills of the country’s richest citizens.Ī separate report from the outlet, released yesterday, found that in 2017 a quarter of Griffin’s income, like that earned on long-term investments, was taxed at a lower federal rate of 20%, with the rest taxed at higher rates.ĭespite the difficulty in tabulating the exact amount the state will lose out on, there's little doubt it will take a hit. ProPublica reported Griffin paid an average federal tax rate of 29.2% from 2013 to 2018 on an average annual income of $1.7 billion.
What has been learned of Griffin’s annual income makes the figure entirely possible, but it’s not as simple as running his annual income through a state tax calculator using the Illinois flat income tax rate of 4.95%. But estimating what he pays in state income taxes to the Illinois treasury-dependent on Griffin’s residency, where and how that income is earned-is harder to estimate, and as an individual earner, not publicly available.īut according to a source familiar with the matter, Griffin has paid more than $1 billion in Illinois state income taxes over the last 10 years.