Growing up in Iowa in the '60s and '70s, my friends and I were always keenly aware of Illinois just to the east, and of Chicago, which, along with Minneapolis, was the closest major city to our rural and suburban Iowa homes. When we were old enough to drive, on weekends some of the more adventurous of us would seek entertainment in those cities, that being a time when a bunch of big, tough farm kids from Iowa could wander around on the Loop on a Saturday night and not have anything bad happen to us other than the next morning's hangover.
It didn't hurt that we generally went into the cities in groups of eight to 10. Even then, though, Illinois and Chicago had their problems. There were parts of town that even 10 big, tough Iowa farm kids knew better than to go into.
Those problems have gotten worse. Illinois is one of the most dysfunctional states in the Union at the moment, and the Land of Lincoln's failures have become so obvious, so manifest that even a British news outlet, the Daily Mail, has had to take notice.
Move over California and New York, a new state is in contention for the 'most dysfunctional' in America.
Illinois is grappling with a string of issues which have triggered a rise in residents departing the state.
The state has struggled to add jobs and its public pension debt has ballooned to nearly $150 billion. Meanwhile, its population has declined, hurting tax income.
Conservative thinktanks have now grouped Illinois with other blue states like New York and California, which have also faced an exodus amid issues ranging from immigration to crime.
'Unemployment rates are very high; wage growth is lagging compared to most other states,' said Bryce Hill, the director of fiscal and economic research at the Illinois Policy Institute.
As is the case in so many places, Illinois politics is dominated by Cook County and Chicago, and has been so for decades. In recent years, a string of aggressively ignorant and incompetent mayors have made things worse, leading to an exodus of the productive not only from Chicago but from Illinois. In Chicago, some of the residents who remain have had enough, and they are letting their elected officials know it.
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Decades of liberal Democrat governance have destroyed the state financially.
Illinois' pension debt also grew by $2.6 billion last year to reach $142.3 billion in unfunded liabilities, state data shows.
A September 2022 report by Equable said it has the second worst funded state pension in the country after Kentucky.
State accountants also project it will have a budget deficit of $891 million in the next fiscal year.
Illinois is in fiscal free fall - and its crime rate is rising, driven (again) by Cook County and Chicago.
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Violent crime in Chicago is up. Arrests are down. Can you imagine how that could be the case?
Illinois is, as the British staff at the Daily Mail might say, 'a right old mess.' It's gotten bad enough that there is a secession movement, mostly in the conservative southern counties of the state, which should ring familiar to anyone who lives in northern California or southern Oregon. And it's a nationwide trend; blue states are bleeding population as the productive residents bail those ever-more-troubled jurisdictions to check out that greener grass on the other side of the fence.
Big government is a model that never works, but liberal and progressive politicians just keep trying it, usually with the disclaimer that socialism will work if we just put the right Top Men in charge.
And yet those jurisdictions keep voting in the same lunatics, to take charge of the same asylum. This is a self-perpetuating cycle; big-city politicians promise an ever-expanding gravy train of free stuff, to be paid for by taxes levied on people who are increasingly fleeing the area, to be distributed to people who toil not neither do they spin, but who always have their hands out. The politicians have found a niche; they wouldn't make it in the employment marketplace but show a remarkable aptitude for graft.
The trouble is, like the Soviet Union, they have built a system that can't be sustained. Our major cities and the Democrat-controlled jurisdictions in general are houses of cards, growing ever taller and more wobbly, and sooner or later the whole mess will all come crashing down.
Chicago, Cook County, and the state of Illinois may well be leading the charge into chaos.
