Kane County Reporter

Former Republican state Senate candidate Ben Bierly can’t see how anyone would be surprised Illinois experienced its most significant job losses in history in 2020.

“With COVID[-19] hitting the way it did, it was pretty much to be expected,” Bierly told the Kane County Reporter. “And as bad as that proved to be, I think the ungodly way Democratic leaders handled it caused as much suffering as the virus itself. From Day 1, they never considered the human factor. It was all about politics.”

The state shed upward of 423,000 jobs, which equates to 7% of its workforce last year. In Chicago, where unemployment numbers significant, rates more than tripled over a yearlong period ending in December 2020 to 8.7%.

“How can you not be hurt by a government that ignores all the pain and suffering being felt by its people,” Bierly said. “We’ve lost thousands of our small businesses, and more people have become unemployed than you can count, and all the Pritzker administration has continued to do is impose more restrictions and trigger more shutdowns. Instead of looking to fix the problem, they’ve just punted to [the] federal government and the hope of getting a bailout. They’ve created this economic environment where people are being forced to go into further debt, live off less and survive in an unsteady jobs market.”

Bierly said his advice to Gov. J.B. Pritzker would be to take a page out of some of the other Midwestern states that have found a way to stay afloat even as the winds of the pandemic have continued to swirl.

“The states that are doing better haven’t played games and have sought to keep as many businesses safely open as they could,” he said. “We need to be concentrating on a similar approach.”