When hearing about the woes of blue states, names like California and New York immediately come to mind, but we may need to add a new name to the list of places Democratic officials are ruining: Illinois.
The Daily Caller reported on Thursday that new data indicates the state our 16th president, Abraham Lincoln, once called home is in a downward spiral.
While California is still leading the nation with the worst unemployment rate in the country at 5.3 percent, Illionois is not far behind in fifth with 4.8 percent.
The comparisons don’t stop there. With the 8th highest tax burden and high crime rates, many Illinoisans are opting to simply leave the state for greener pastures — as Californians have been doing.
Bryce Hill, director of fiscal and economic research at the Illinois Policy Institute, told the Daily Caller News Foundation, “The Census Bureau has reported that residents are leaving the state en masse to the tune of hundreds of thousands every single year, so much so that the state’s population has actually been declining for the past 10 years.”
As of July 2023, Illinois population was 12,549,689. That number was down 32,826 from 2022. Census data showed this fall has been steady, as the population as of April 1, 2020, was 12,813,469.
Heartland Institute Senior Fellow S.T. Karnick cited a few reasons for this decline. “Opinion polls cite high taxes as the top reason people want to leave Illinois, with crime and safety second. Illinois has the fourth-most regulations among the 50 states, which raises prices and kills jobs.”
Violent crime in Chicago went up 18 percent in 2023 compared to ten years prior, with arrests dropping 33 percent over the same time.
Hellbound and Down 
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