IL-Update

Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone make plans that don't work out. Almost everyone spends money unnecessarily at one time or another. The key isn't to beat yourself up when you do these things. Rather, your job is to learn from them and try very hard not to repeat the same mistakes, the same plans, and the same spending errors.

For decades, IL was governed under the Blue Model. Sure there was an occasional GOP governor, but the State legislature was predictably and uniformly Democratic. It was the Democratic legislature where spending was initiated, budgets were established, and promises were made. Big state pensions, no problem. Bigger and bigger spending on everything from social programs to state universities—gotta do it. Larger and larger numbers of state employees—IL needed the "services."

Big state government and BIG concessions to public sector unions demanded ever B-I-G-G-E-R state spending. The problem was IL Democrats didn't learn from their mistakes, never modified their faulty plans, and never-ever considered reigning in their profligate spending until it was far too late. They raised taxes on "the rich," and when that money wasn't enough, on everyone else. What we're watching in IL today is the end game for the Blue Model. Liabilities are massive and revenues are shrinking; people and businesses are leaving, and IL is nearing bankruptcy.

Unpaid bills are approaching $16 billion (not to mention a $250 billion pension liability) and the state hasn't had a budget in over two years. Yet IL Democrats often lectured their opponents on the importance of the many entitlement and social programs they have created over the past 50 years. Those programs were designed to help a constituency the Dems claim to care about. And now, under their continuous governance those constituencies are left twisting in the wind as money runs out.

Shibani Mahtani and Douglas Belkin report on the crisis in IL:

Some social-services agencies have given up on receiving state funding. Others have closed entirely, leaving some rural communities without mental-health clinics, domestic-violence shelters and drug-treatment clinics, despite an opioid crisis gripping some towns downstate.

Illinois has lost more residents than any other American state for the third year in a row, with 90% of the state’s counties seeing a drop in population, shrinking the state’s tax base. In 2016, a net of 37,508 people left, according to census data, putting the population at its lowest in nearly a decade.

Illinois was one of just eight states in the country, and the only Midwestern one, to lose residents last year.

“It’s not just the budget crisis; it’s that people don’t have any confidence in what the state is going to do next,” says Laurence Msall, president of the Civic Federation, a nonpartisan Chicago-based government-watchdog group backed by business leaders. “There is fear of an enormous tax increase. The uncertainty is driving people from the state.”

At a national level the Democrats can't seem to fathom how they lost so many elections, including the recent presidential election. All they have to do is take an objective look at IL. It just might be that when voters in other states look at IL, they react by voicing no confidence in the Blue Model. And maybe, just maybe, that's because a significant number of voters believe that Democrats seem unable to learn from their mistakes and unwilling to face the harsh reality that their conceptualization of the Blue Model simply doesn't work.