Yesterday I remarked on how the ongoing flight from Illinois reduces our ability to pay our bills while our bills don’t decline. I didn’t realize the extent of the problem. In their editorial on Illinois population decline, the editors of the Wall Street Journal note:

The numbers are especially worrisome for the state’s tax base because the average person moving out of the state earns some $20,000 more than the average person moving in. According to IRS data for tax year 2014 (filed in 2015), the average income of the taxpayer leaving Illinois was $76,824 while the average income of the new arrival was $56,689.

That gap is widening and the differential can be traced to policy decisions as the state staggers under pension debt and an entrenched Democratic-public union machine in Springfield. In an effort to cover growing debt, in January 2011 state lawmakers raised the personal income tax rate to 5% from 3% and the corporate income tax to 9.5% from 7.3%.

According to an analysis of Census data by the Illinois Policy Institute, for the 16 years before the tax hike Illinois lost an average of some 66,800 people in net migration. The exodus accelerated to 73,500 from July 2011 to July 2012, 67,300 in 2012-2013, 95,000 in 2013-2014, 105,000 in 2014-2015 and 114,000 this year.

Let that sink in. Illinois’s population isn’t just decreasing. Since the numbers of those fleeing are increasing and the remaining population is lower, the rate of population decline per 100,000 population is accelerating. And the aggregate state income is declining.

Let’s not mince words. Illinois’s problems are the fault of the corrupt Democratic leadership. Mike Madigan has been Speaker of the Illinois House for more than 40 years. During that period he has become a multi-millionaire—a prima facie case on its own for corruption.

The solution to Illinois’s problems notionally supported by Democrats is a tax increase. How that will function when increasing taxes are obviously one of the motivations for people with higher incomes leaving the state is beyond me but that’s their plan. Democrats had the ability to raise taxes without needing a single Republican vote. Why didn’t they? Clearly, because they knew it wouldn’t work and their failure would lead to their being voted out of office. Bruce Rauner’s election as governor, largely on the basis of the temporary income tax increase Democrats hoped would become permanent, is evidence of the correctness of that theory. They haven’t even been able to enact a budget let alone a tax increase.

Now they have neither the courage nor the ability to enact their tax increase into law.

Being thrown out of office is not nearly enough. They’ve been looting the state for decades, largely to their own benefit.

How that will happen is beyond me, too. In Illinois 85% of offices run uncontested.

Chicago is closing in on 800 homicides for 2016. Year-to-date 771 have been murdered in the city of Chicago. The editors of the Chicago Tribune declaim:

This is where we’d like to write a fat passage about how seriously Chicago’s elected officials take the carnage on their watch, about all they’re doing in their respective fiefs to respond.

Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson certainly takes the carnage seriously. He speaks often about people who wind up on the business end of a bullet. He speaks, too, about the crime-ravaged neighborhoods where law-abiding citizens wonder who’ll be the next youngster to fall — neighborhoods that many residents have fled, often to Chicago’s suburbs.

Most Chicago legislators and aldermen, though, are in hiding. They know what’s happening in their districts or wards, yet take no ownership — except to complain that they want more cops in their neighborhoods. Don’t we all.

A few politicians, including state Sen. Kwame Raoul, D-Chicago, are on the case. Raoul, with encouragement from Johnson, has pledged to introduce legislation that would lengthen sentences for repeat gun offenders. We’ve long supported that, proposing that for every casket of an innocent who is buried, a casket should be transported to the steps of the Illinois Capitol and neatly stacked in a pyramid until lawmakers act.

But we also remember what happened the last time a proposal comparable to Raoul’s briefly had traction. That was in autumn 2013 — a bill backed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel and then-Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez. The bill failed because African-American lawmakers were concerned that increased incarceration would hurt their communities. Speaker Michael Madigan adjourned the House to avoid a potentially fiery debate pitting black and Latino lawmakers against mostly white Chicago-area and Downstate lawmakers. That would have exposed philosophical fissures among Madigan’s Democrats.

In a companion commentary piece the Tribune is publishing today, Raoul and three other Chicago-area lawmakers explain the legislation they’ll push in 2017. We hope the General Assembly will follow through this time.

And the feckless aldermen? We’ve written of their assets — their local prominence, their bully pulpits, their resources that should be focused on building stronger anti-crime efforts in their respective wards. The aldermen are uniquely positioned to help rebuild trust between civilians and police officers. We’ve urged aldermen to step forward instead of pointing fingers anywhere but at themselves. And we draw their wrath when we ask them three questions:

Have you insisted that parents in your ward search their dwellings for guns? Have you organized your constituents, block by block, to occupy hot intersections? Have you demanded that your constituents cooperate with law enforcement to help stop the bloodshed?

There’s a reason you haven’t read about Chicago aldermen crusading on this brief agenda in their wards. It’s easier for them to curse the violence than to risk alienating some voters by calling more attention to it.

The evidence that greater police presence as such will reduce the number of violent crimes is weak at best. It’s more dependent on the nature of that presence and the relationship between the police officers and the community and, frankly, in the neighborhoods where most of the murders are taking place that relationship is very bad. Police corruption over a period of decades will have that effect.

An unseasonably cold December is probably the only thing shielding Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel from the number of homicides hitting 800 this year. The homicide rate per 100,000 population is already at historic highs.

At RealClearPolitics Sean Trende speculates on the upcoming reapportioning to take place following the 2020 decennial census. What’s likely to happen?

In other words, Florida, Arizona and Texas are “on the bubble” for their 29th, 10th, and 39th seats, while California is close to losing a seat, while Illinois is close to losing a second seat. With some relatively minor changes in population growth patterns, we could easily see one of them fail to win these seats. If one of these states does miss the projection, who could benefit? Seat Nos. 436-440 are projected to be: Montana 2 (436), Alabama 7 (437), California 54 (438), Minnesota 8 (439) and Virginia 12 (440). So we could see Montana gain back the seat that it lost after the 1990 census.

Overall, this represents very little change in the Electoral College. While the apportionment shifts are to states controlled by Republican legislatures (for now), it would probably benefit Democrats overall, as it is pretty difficult to eliminate any more Democratic seats in places like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan, while states like Texas and Florida would probably have to draw at least some Democratic-leaning districts.

As I’ve written before I think we’re already seeing the effects of this in the outcome of the 2016 election. Deep Blue States aren’t quite as blue as they used to be while dark Red States were less red.

People are voting with their feet and those whose lives are most portable are moving first. Larger questions are how will the push and pull factors inducing the movement affect the situation? Who will blink first?

While I agree with Elizabeth McNichol’s observation in her post at RealClearPolicy that state and local tax policies may exacerbate income inequality:

That’s because state policymakers, over the years, have tended to choose tax policies that favor the wealthy over the poor and favor corporations over workers. For example, most states rely heavily on sales taxes, which hit low-income families especially hard because they generally spend (rather than save or invest) most or all of their income.

I have reservations about her proposed remedies, which consist of avoiding cutting income taxes or increasing sales taxes and increasing the top marginal personal income tax rates:

tates can help push back against this trend by using tax policy to reduce inequality instead of worsening it. They can raise taxes on high-income households by boosting their top income tax rate and capping tax breaks for high-income taxpayers. They can also create or expand Earned Income Tax Credits for low- and middle-income workers, raise taxes on inherited wealth, and eliminate costly and ineffective tax breaks for corporations.

At the same time, states should avoid actions — such as cutting income taxes or raising sales taxes — that expand inequality by shifting more of the tax responsibility to lower-income residents. And they should avoid cutting taxes deeply without replacing the lost revenues, which could force drastic cuts in services such as schools, transportation, and public safety, which are the building blocks of shared prosperity.

Sadly, she presents no evidence for the effectiveness of her proposals and there may be a good reason for that: they aren’t particularly effective. If a more steeply graduated state income tax were a remedy for income inequality within the states, as a state’s top marginal tax rates increase you’d expect income inequality to decline. That hasn’t been the case in California, the state with the most highly graduated state income tax. The opposite has happened, if anything, suggesting either that other forces are just too much for tax policy to address or that the main effect of a steeply graduated income tax is to increase the return on investment for rent-seeking. When you add that California’s tax policy has resulted in its revenues becoming mercurial while its expenses are much more predictable, resulting in fiscal instability, it suggests that tax policy is just not a particularly effective tool in social engineering.

A more effective strategy might be to focus attention on the factors that are actually driving income inequality in the state.

Illinois! The Chicago Tribune reports that Illinois has lost more residents than any other state for the third consecutive year:

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.

Illinois is among just eight states to lose residents, putting its population at 12,801,539 people, its lowest since about 2009. Illinois’ population first began to drop in 2014, when the state lost 11,961 people. That number more than doubled in 2015, with a loss of 28,497 people, and further multiplied in 2016.

If you change your yardstick to domestic outmigration, that is you ignore new immigrants, the state that has lost the largest number of residents is California followed by New York. Illinois still ranks first in domestic outmigration as a percentage of total population. I continue to believe that when the dust has settled and the history of the 2016 election is written, migration from Blue States to Red States will be a major part of that history.

Illinois is a place where people come and stay to work. Very few people live here for the climate or the scenery. Hostility to business and job creation and a generally mercurial government present problems that Illinois needs to change quickly before it’s too late.

It may already be too late. A large proportion of Illinois’s bills are pension payments to public employees who worked when here when Illinois was a bigger state with a bigger, wealthier tax base. A shrinking tax base finds it harder to pay those bills than a growing one would.

Even if you’re not interested in religion, history, statistics, neuropsychology, or epistemology, you might be interested in this explication at Nautilus of the origins of Bayesian statistics.

The story of the pollution of Flint, Michigan’s water supply continues its miserable slog towards being one of the gravest scandals involving official misconduct in American history. The Washington Post reports that four more officials face felony charges in the matter:

Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette filed another round of criminal charges Tuesday in the ongoing water crisis in Flint, the latest action in a nearly year-long investigation to hold accountable those responsible for a disaster that exposed thousands of children to dangerously high lead levels.

Schuette announced felony charges against four people, including two former state-appointed emergency managers who oversaw a disastrous switch of the city’s drinking water source to the Flint River. Darnell Earley, whom Gov. Rick Snyder (R) put in charge of the city’s finances from late 2013 through early 2015, and Gerald Ambrose, who held the emergency manager position through April 2015, could face decades in prison.

Prosecutors allege that the emergency managers conspired with two Flint employees, public works Superintendent Howard Croft and utilities Administrator Daugherty Johnson, to enter into a contract under false pretenses that bound the city to use the river for its drinking water, even though the local water plant was in no condition to properly deliver safe water to residents.

As I began researching this post, I started looking into the history of American political scandals and was appalled at how many sex scandals of little actual lasting significance made the lists of major scandals. In addition to the Flint, Michigan affair here are some of the incidents that I consider the gravest examples of scandal and corruption in American history:

In the Teapot Dome bribery scandal which unfolded in 1921 and 1922 the Secretary of the Interior was convicted of taking a bribe relating to government leases in Wyoming.

A dozen or more Congressmen were implicated in this 1867 railroad bribery case.

110 convictions were made in this case of diversion of tax revenues. That both the Crédit Mobilier and Whiskey Ring scandals took place during Grant’s term of office made his the most scandal-plagued in American history and that was not lost on people at the time.

93 people were indicted including 17 judges, 15 of whom were convicted, as a consequence of this investigation of official misconduct and bribery in the Cook County, Illinois judicial system in the 1980s.

More than a dozen top Reagan Administration officials were either indicted or received immunity for their testimony in this complicated case of official corruption involving sales of arms to Iran and shuffling the proceeds to aid the U. S.-backed rebels in Nicaragua.

I’m accepting nominations for the greatest examples of official misconduct in U. S. history. To qualify the nominees should not be offenses of a primarily political nature or be sex scandals unless they involved more than a handful of individuals. Things that come to mind include the findings of the Knapp Commission. The New Orleans Police Department, of course, is in a class of its own.

I suspect we’ll see a lot of articles in the coming years like this one at VoxEU, proposing that Ethiopia’s economic development plans might want to consider skipping industrial development and go straight to a post-industrial economy:

A country’s path to middle-income status lies, in large part, through industrialisation. African countries are scrambling to bring industrial firms into the continent. As low-income countries industrialise, more workers will be able to choose between informal self-employment and low-skill manufacturing. What do workers trade off when they make this choice, and what are the long-run impacts? How well do we understand the relative costs and benefits of these types of work?

It seems to me that the opportunities for developing countries are closing rapidly. With China’s manufacturing economy overbuilt as enormously as it is, many sectors capable on their own of supplying the entirety of world demand, how much room is there for more industrial development? With an India full of (more or less) English-speaking and college educated people looking for jobs, what opportunities are there for Ethiopian service providers?

Greece is just full of small companies and entrepeneurs. The problem there is capitalization. Why won’t an Ethiopia that skips the industrialization step succumb to the same problems Greece has?

There’s an interesting report at BBC on a series of killings in Turkey apparently perpetrated by Russian hitmen. It’s written in a sort of stream of consciousness style so it’s difficult to excerpt. I couldn’t identify the name of the piece’s author but he seems to believe that the Russian government is behind these killings.

He might be right but there are any number of shadowy and nefarious Russian groups these days. Besides the Russian government there’s organized crime, oligarchs, competing Chechen groups, and others who just might have wanted these men dead. Sometimes it’s difficult to tell where one of these groups ends and another begins.

We’ll need to keep our eyes opened for more developments on this story.