Californians moving to Texas, New Yorkers to Florida Californians moving to Texas, New Yorkers to FloridaThe most dysfunctional state in America? Soaring unemployment, sky-rocketing debt and punishing taxes send residents fleeing
Excerpt:
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.
.....So on any metric, quantitatively on outcomes, Illinois’ economy is lagging.’
Census Bureau data reveals the population fell by around 32,826 people in the year to July 2023. The population of 12,549,689 was also more than a quarter of a million less than in April 2020.
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.
Governor J.B. Pritzker has defended his record in office and told a state of the state and budget address in February that his administration has ‘grown Illinois’ economy to over $1 trillion’.
Illinois’ unemployment rate of 4.8 percent is also the fifth-highest in the country.
.....Migrants take over $10 billion worth of income with them out of state when we lose people due to domestic migration, so it certainly has an impact on not only the state’s pocketbooks but local tax revenues as well.
‘But they’re not the root cause of the state’s budgetary stress, because the state also has another very large issue to contend with, which is unfunded pension liabilities that are eating into state and local government budgets and crowding out funding and taking up large sources of revenue.’
The situation in Illinois follows similar trends in New York and California, which have both lost hundreds of thousands of residents in recent years - with many of those relocating to low tax, red states like Florida and Texas.
US Census Bureau data published last October revealed California and New York combined lost nearly 1.4 million residents in 2022.
*********
Underfunded state pensions(for overpaid sloths), another time bomb