Donald N. Muhammad CPO-EPP

Major companies that left Illinois under JB Pritzker: • Boeing → Virginia (2022) — closer to the Pentagon • Caterpillar → Texas (2022) — ~230 HQ jobs. Lower taxes • Citadel → Florida (2022) — Griffin cited crime (employees mugged & stabbed) + taxes. From ~1,100 jobs down to ~200 • Tyson Foods → Arkansas (2022) • TTX → North Carolina (2023) • Morton Salt → Kansas (2024) — founded in Chicago in 1848 • PEAK6 → Texas (2025) Why they left: High taxes (Illinois 9.5% corporate rate, one of the highest), crime in Chicago, pension costs, and a bad business climate. Texas and Florida have no traditional corporate income tax. Boeing also wanted to be near regulators. Caterpillar had warned Illinois years earlier about competitiveness. What they took: High-paying jobs and tax revenue. Citadel alone is estimated to have cost Illinois $100–250 million a year in taxes. Caterpillar moved corporate roles. Tyson closed its Chicago offices. Overall, Illinois lost 218 businesses to other states in 2023 alone — triple the pre-pandemic rate. How it hurts Illinois: Those jobs and HQs paid income and corporate taxes that fund schools, roads, and services. When they leave, the tax base shrinks and the burden falls harder on the people and businesses that stay. Finance jobs stayed soft after Citadel left. Real companies, real reasons, real money and jobs gone. Illinois lost real money when these companies left, and the biggest documented hit came from Citadel. After Ken Griffin moved the firm to Miami, estimates put the recurring annual loss in state and local tax revenue at $100–250 million from the employees and company combined. Griffin himself had been paying more than $200 million a year in Illinois state income taxes at his peak, and that revenue disappeared with him. High-paying headquarters and finance jobs generate outsized income, sales, and related taxes, so the departures of Citadel, Caterpillar’s corporate roles, Tyson’s Chicago offices, and the others reduced the tax base that funds schools, infrastructure, and services. Exact statewide totals across every company are hard to pin down because most firms do not publicly report their full Illinois tax payments, but the pattern is clear: when these operations left, the money and the high-wage jobs went with them, leaving a smaller tax base and more pressure on the residents and businesses that stayed. Would you vote for a governor who watched major companies pack up their headquarters, take high-paying jobs and hundreds of millions in tax revenue with them, and still claims Illinois is open for business? JB Pritzker really sat there and let Boeing, Caterpillar, Citadel, and the rest pack up and leave with the jobs and tax money, then still tries to act like Illinois is open for business. Make it make sense.