This post was inspired by a comment left on another post. Raising taxes and hoping that an improving national economy will trickle down to Illinois is a poor strategy for Illinois. Illinois is not a destination state like California, Florida, New York, or even North Carolina. People don’t come here for the scenery or the benign climate or to savor the view from a highrise apartment overlooking Central Park.
What will happen in Illinois at the end of four years of raise taxes, raise the minimum wage, and hope? Illinois’s liabilities will have grown while its tax base has deteriorated which will put even more demands on a limited revenue stream.
Illinois needs to face its problems the two greatest of which are that its public employee pension funds don’t have enough money in them to pay what’s been promised and the state’s Medicaid tab is too high. Can incumbents be re-elected on the basis of dealing with those problems? I don’t think so. And that’s Illinois’s biggest problem.
I’m afraid IL has reached the point of no return and that re-election of Quinn indicates no willingness to deal with it on the part of the electorate. Hence, many of those who are funding the state, or are being counted upon to fund it in the future, are slowly and quietly heading out the back door, exacerbating the problem. It is so tragic in that Chicago still is very attractive, yet slowly becoming less so.
Who to blame other than the pols? When does the death spiral become terminal? I don’t know. “North Shore Liberals” should know better. Maybe they just don’t care. People like me, whose very customers include pension funds, are dizzied at the hole the system is in, and know who they will come hunting for when the proverbial shit hits the fan. I’m not waiting. Those who vote for the goodies could be blamed, but a professorial discussion of 8% actuarial return assumptions, risk adjusted returns or the effect of QE on fixed income securities just isn’t their cup of tea, and perhaps shouldn’t be.
My daughter feels none of the allure that captivated a young man from Indianapolis who wanted to go to the big city, and knew damned well there were two institutions that could be keys to “making it” in that big city: Northwestern and University of Chicago. My daughter talks about the southeast: Florida, Clemson, UNC, Emory etcetera. You think she’s coming back? “Go southeast, young woman.”
And it’s just as easy to manufacture and efficiently distribute widgets from Merrillville, IN or Davenport, IA as the far south or southwest side of Chicago or Kankakee…………sans the bullshit.
Maybe Rauner will win and take on the Chicago / IL machine, but he will still have to deal with Madigan. It’s going to be a tough battle. Eastern Michigan didn’t make it. Good luck Illinois.