Eye On Illinois: CNI child tax credit tool lets people learn if they’re in the 13%

“If your gross monthly income is $3,880, an extra $25 is helpful, but not transformative.”

That sentence came from a June 5 column about the child tax credit taking effect in 2025. The $50 million program – which should double next year – will affect perhaps 13% of Illinois’ personal income tax filers. The maximum tax break is about $300 for filers with three or more children ages 12 and younger.

Capitol News Illinois devised an eligibility tool. For more information, visit tinyurl.com/IllinoisCTC. No one is expecting this effort alone to eradicate poverty, but every little bit helps.

ON THIS DAY: Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon – born this day in 1916 – wasn’t a native Illinoisan, but he did pursue higher education at the University of Chicago and taught political science at Illinois Institute of Technology before leaving for Pittsburgh’s Carnegie-Mellon University in 1949.

Unlike many prominent Americans of the early 20th century, whose exact words might be lost to history, Simon’s quotes are readily verifiable through almost 30 books and almost 1,000 academic papers on topics from psychology and artificial intelligence to political science and economics and beyond.

Among his insights is this quote, from 1971: “In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”

And this, from 1947: “If by motivation we mean whatever it is that causes someone to follow a particular course of action, then every action is motivated – by definition. But in most human behavior the relation between motives and action is not simple; it is mediated by a whole chain of events and surrounding conditions.”

CENTENNIAL CONTRIBUTIONS: As part of plans to celebrate Route 66′s 1926 commissioning, the Illinois State Museum is looking for people willing to be recorded sharing memories of the “Mother Road.” In addition to those with traveling stories, curators are interested in people connected to businesses that served travelers, like restaurants and service stations, first responders and those involved in building or maintaining America’s most famous highway.

Eventually, there will be a database of video interviews and transcriptions, which represents a growing trend of using widely accessible technology to preserve first-person accounts while also underscoring how Route 66 belongs to everybody and nobody, that whatever experts or historians might observe, the real stories of everyday people are what will carry this piece of the past into forever.

For more information, contact Route 66 project coordinator Judy Wagenblast at jwagenblastp@gmail.com.

• Scott T. Holland writes about state government issues for Shaw Local News Network. Follow him on X @sth749. He can be reached at sholland@shawmedia.com.