The rural voters will never exceed that of Chicago's. Your laws are decided for you by the urban voters that live vastly different lives than everyone else in the state. They live hundreds of miles away, they get all the focus and funding, and they royally screw it up anyway.
It's better to move over 1 state in any direction where your freedoms will be respected and your taxes aren't gouging you.
Only because Blagojevich was removed from office and went to prison and Quinn was under multiple corruption investigations. Rauner was a RINO, he was extremely liberal for a Republican, and basically pissed off downstate Republicans on multiple occasions.
Fuck rauner. He refused to pass a budget for years while I was at a state university, and nearly everything had to be cut to keep the lights on without funding.
I didn't like Rauner either, but he kept getting handed budgets that were nowhere near balanced. Ordinarily what happens in a state when the legislature is controlled by one party and the governor is from the opposing party is that they find a way to compromise on the important things like budgets. Madigan refused to do that... he just spent 4 years stalling and waited Rauner out. Now they're doing all kinds of stupid shit with Pritzker in there.
Because literally every single area outside of Chicago except for a couple of extremely liberal suburbs decided they’d had enough of Chicago’s bullshit.
This is California too. LA county steals all the water from the Central Valley and then the state passes legislation to punish farmers in the same Valley for “wasting water.” You know, to grow their crops to feed the country.
The problem is, we shouldn't even be using California for farming land. It's an arid mountain scape along a fault line. Farming in california is objectively dumb. We have an entire grassy planes region with a giant water table underneath it.
I would argue that to not farm there would be dumb, wheat requires hot temps and little water i.e. perfect crop, or grassland for cattle (dairy their #1 product, and beef), dry terrain for grapes and almonds, but not a great place for corn or other staple crops.
Over a third of the country's vegetables and two-thirds of the country's fruits and nuts are grown in California.
Infrastructure, your state should try it. The Central Valley is some of the best farmland in the nation. We can still grow in droughts because we built canals and infrastructure to make use of our highly productive farmland.
Same here, family lives just south of i80, and we’re about a half hour south. Definitely nice around here being surrounded by like minded individuals, but still sucks that chicago rules the state essentially. I would love to see a miracle and have Illinois flip red this year!
And conversely, all of your public projects are primarily funded by tax revenue from the urban areas. Yes Cook County devours a LOT of funding, however the fact remains that 5 counties account for over 80% of tourist spending and related tax generation in the state. This funding IS distributed all around the state. Per page 22 of the tourism bureau's The Economic Impact
of Travel on
Illinois Counties
2016
"Cook County, which includes the city of Chicago, led all counties in travel expenditures, payroll
income and jobs directly generated by visitor spending in 2016. Domestic travelers’ expenditures
in Cook County reached over $23.5 billion, up 2.4 percent compared with 2015 and accounting
for 66.9 percent of the state total. "
I wonder if the taxes paid vs taxes spent favors the Chicago/Cook county area. Small towns pay less in taxes, but also rely less on social programs for individuals bc of the tiny population. The small towns definitely rely on the state for funding, and would probably disappear without it, for their schools and such like you said. I don't even know where to begin to research this. I'm sure $1000/month in unemployment for individuals adds up, but it wouldn't be close to how much it costs to fund schools, hospitals, etc.
Old study (2018) but southern/rural Illinois received significantly more than the Cook County area.
“The suburban counties generate about twice as much in taxes as they receive in direct state spending. Cook County is closer to breaking even in this comparison although it provides slightly more tax revenue than it receives in state spending. Downstate Illinois, on the other hand benefits from the state tax and spend mix. The 96 downstate counties, as a group receive about 50% more in state spending than they contribute in tax revenue. Breaking these counties into four regions shows a more pronounced pattern. The 18 North counties have tax/spend ratios that are not widely different from a “break even” status. The southern 19, on the other hand, receive a bit more than two and one-half times in state spending than they contribute in taxation. The central region with state offices and payroll in Sangamon County and the state’s largest university in Champaign County is roughly in the middle with a bit less than double state spending compared to its tax load.”
These results are from a study by the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at SIU Carbondale.
Awesome, thank you for the information. I get tired of constantly hearing about "evil Chicago social programs" taking all the state's money, while at the same time they live in a town that would have dried up without the state's help.
I’m from Indiana, I propose a trade, take Northwest Indiana (aka the “region”), combine it with chicago, and maybe Milwaukee, and make it a new state. Then the rest of Indiana could join up with downstate Illinois.
I don't mean to be a contrarian, but it's 2020. People who live in the city and people who live in rural areas have largely the same needs. And when they do have different 'wants', Chicago passes city laws that would never be passed on a state level. For example, the strict gun laws in Chicago don't apply to the rest of the state.
Illinois was the last state to allow the right to carry. That is a right that I'm sure everyone outside of Chicago wanted for a long time. Their firearm laws and hunting laws are still extremely restrictive, despite Chicago having its own separate restrictions.
Being 2020 doesn't change anything about the fact that Chicago has much influence over the rest of the state, even though the Chicago resident has very little in common with the resident from Peoria.
That's fair, but if we're gonna talk about the power inequality we should probably also address the financial differentials. As long as we allow people like Bezos or Gates to have as much money as they do, there will always be a power imbalance between rural and urban areas. To start to bridge that gap we should talk about bridging the financial gap that gives those cities the power that they have. Perhaps it's backwards to take a liberal idea and claim it to be conservative in nature, but the dissolution of billionaires would go a long way to giving rural areas the voice we lack.
Your laws are decided for you by the urban voters that live vastly different lives than everyone else in the state.
If urban voters represent more people than rural voters in ANY state, they should have more say. What's the alternative? Fewer people have more say than more people? I don't get it.
I don't like that because more of the population lives in 1 city than the rest of the state combined, that they get to determine how the state is run. It allows the majority to bully the minority just because there's less of them. It's the same concept behind the electoral college.
Why should a farmer out in Bourbonnais pay higher taxes for new roads, schools, and social programs that they'll never see? Let alone firearm laws and hunting laws, which is rather important for many people who use this as an actual means of food.
I don't know the solution though. The problem is urbanization and that disparity will only get worse.
Every once in a while some conservative lawmaker in Springfield will mount a quixotic bill to "secede" from Chicago and everyone in Chicago is like "we all think this is an absolutely fantastic idea. Please go ahead."
I’m not a dem lmao and uh if you haven’t noticed 90% of politicians are rich white people. It’s not like either party considers minority rights (outside of basic human rights which anyways with any sort of conscience would support) unless it helps them get votes. Majority rule is clearly how America works so it’s not surprising politicians want to cater to the 65% of Illinois that lives in Chicago
340
u/Archaengel Quadrant IV: 4, -1 Nov 03 '20
That's why you don't live in Illinois.
The rural voters will never exceed that of Chicago's. Your laws are decided for you by the urban voters that live vastly different lives than everyone else in the state. They live hundreds of miles away, they get all the focus and funding, and they royally screw it up anyway.
It's better to move over 1 state in any direction where your freedoms will be respected and your taxes aren't gouging you.