By Dave Dahl

SPRINGFIELD – Illinois’ economy has gone bad, but the author of a monthly index of economic health can’t measure how bad.

“The state, in response to the coronavirus problem, changed the way we collect  taxes,” says Fred Giertz, an economics professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “Many retailers, especially food and beverage retailers, were able to defer their taxes, so they would not have shown up” for the April 1 report.

Giertz publishes the Flash index and has done so every month for almost 25 years. Because of the lack of information for the factors he uses – corporate taxes, income taxes, sales taxes – he cannot do so this month.

And, Giertz adds, the free-fall was sudden. “There was no recession on the horizon, especially in the near term, because all of the conventional measures seemed to be doing very well. Employment numbers were very high thru February, so we went from modest progress, which had been going on for a long time, to almost zero – again, that doesn’t happen.”

It’s happening now.

Dave Dahl can be reached at [email protected].