The Incredible Shrinking State

The editors of the Chicago Tribune are alarmed that Illinois continues to shrink:

When he takes office in January, Gov.-elect J.B. Pritzker will have fewer constituents than he might have expected. Unfortunately he’ll also have fewer constituents working and paying taxes to support Illinois’ state and local governments. Every time a worker departs, the tax burden on those of us who remain grows.

The release on Wednesday of new census data about Illinois was alarming: Not only has the flight of citizens continued for a fifth straight year, but the population loss is intensifying. This year’s estimated net reduction of 45,116 residents is the worst of these five losing years.

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Why are so many people departing? Certainly some leave because they don’t like winter weather, or summer humidity, we suppose. But the trail out West or to down South is well worn. There’s nothing new about Sun Belt migration, and indeed, the story in Illinois is that for decades a steady, fairly predictable number of Illinois residents left for other places. Over the past few decades, about 65,000 more people voluntarily left the state each year than arrived. It was neither shocking nor worrisome.

The change came in 2014. That year, with the Great Recession well over, the domestic migration shortfall jumped from 68,204 to 93,704. The negative number jumped again in 2015 (106,544) and again in 2016 (109,941). In 2017, more exodus: 114,779. And now in 2018, Illinois lost another 114,154 people. If you’ve read our editorials about what we call the “Illinois Exodus,” you’ve met many of these people and absorbed their families’ stories. They include young people who will build their futures elsewhere, far from the families who raised them and hoped to keep them close.

Many of them left because they believed Illinois is headed in the wrong direction. Because Illinois politicians have raised taxes, milked employers and created enormous public indebtedness that the pols want to address with … still more taxation.

Consider, too, the implications for a diminished Illinois in Congress. When Madigan was born 76 years ago, Illinois boasted 27 seats in the U.S. House. Yet in recent decades as the growth-squelching, hostile-to-employers agenda of Springfield has driven people to economically friendlier states, that number has plummeted to 18. In the next reapportionment, after the 2020 census, that number surely will drop to 17. Wednesday’s news of continuing population decline here increases the chance the Illinois’ U.S. House delegation instead will shrink to 16.

Left unmentioned: the median income of those departing is higher than the median income of those remaining.

The weather in Illinois didn’t suddenly become worse in 2014 and I’ve been to Texas. It does not have better weather than Illinois. Illinois isn’t losing population to Texas because of Texas’s benign climate other than its business and tax climates.

Illinois cannot tax and borrow its way to prosperity. The reason is simple mathematics: the debt must be serviced by fewer, poorer people than those by whom it was incurred.

J. B. Pritzker was elected on a platform of increased spending and the probably elusive goal of creating a graduated income tax here, something that would require that the state’s constitution be amended.