The Chicago Tribune has a Census update on Illinois:
For the third consecutive year, Illinois has lost more residents than any other state, losing 37,508 people in 2016, which puts its population at the lowest it has been in nearly a decade, according to U.S. census data released Tuesday.
In fact, the Census reports that 114,144 residents fled Illinois last year — the equivalent of the entire city of Peoria, the state’s seventh largest municipality. When offset with local births, deaths, and others moving in, it comes to a net loss of 37,508 residents in just one year. And the Tribune report adds that this is not just a rural or downstate problem, as some might have expected previously — Chicago has been losing population as well.
And then there’s this, which makes the idea behind Donald Trump’s clumsy and patronizing pitch for black votes seem a bit less crazy, and in fact possibly even something potent if ever made competently:
Leading the exodus to warmer states is the black population, in search of more stable incomes, safe neighborhoods and prosperity. Between 2014 and 2015, more than 9,000 black residents left Cook County.
The overall number of residents that Illinois has lost is alarming in historical terms. It was about 12,000 in 2014, 28,000 in 2015, and nearly 40,000 this year, for a net loss of nearly 80,000 residents over three years. That represents the equivalent of Bloomington — Illinois’ twelfth largest city. The shrinkage is so acute that Pennsylvania could soon overtake Illinois as the nation’s sixth-largest state, even though it lost (a mere) 8,000 residents on net last year.
It probably isn’t just the lousy Midwestern weather causing Illinoisans to disappear, either — the Midwest region overall gained 400,000 residents on net during the same three-year period, despite being dragged down by Illinois’ losses. Minnesota gained almost the same number of residents Illinois lost. Neighboring Indiana and Wisconsin were also net gainers over the same period, as were Iowa, Missouri and even Michigan and Ohio.
So, what’s the matter with Illinois? Its weather cannot be changed, but its decades of misgovernment probably could be. The state’s finances are strained to the breaking point. It pays its many of its bills with IOUs just to make ends meet — even its lottery pays out IOUs for large prizes.
Desperately needed attempts to reform Illinois’ pension system, even for newly hired public employees, have been ferociously resisted by unions and repeatedly blocked by the state Supreme Court. So have other political reforms that could shake up a corrupt state government. State ballot measures on term limits and redistricting reform, underwritten and championed by Republican Bruce Rauner before and after he became governor two years ago, were each blocked from the ballot by the state courts — the latter earlier this year by the state Supreme Court on a party-line vote.
Illinois is essentially a one-party Democratic state now, even if it does have a Republican governor. Its levels of taxation have worsened over time, and its fiscal situation has not improved. (Although it happened a few years earlier, Illinois was the scene of a literal midnight action by Democrats to raise taxes by 66 percent in January 2011, right before they lost the numbers they would have needed to pass it through the state legislature. And that’s typical, really.)
Chicago’s increase in crime currently leads the nation — the Windy City accounts for nearly half of the nation’s spike in murders in 2016, if the Brennan Center’s new analysis is to be believed.
In short, the federal government’s apparent inability to fix its problems or get necessary things done is rather mild compared to the problems Illinois faces. Its fiscal problems are also considerably worse, given its shrinking tax base and lack of its own currency. The threat of massive emergency tax increases, extreme cuts to services, or even sovereign default loom over anyone who is thinking of moving there.
Perhaps the real question is why more people haven’t left already.
