Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

That $140 Billion is just the state. Chicago is at $36 Billion - $45K per taxpayer (if there are any left). And then you have all the counties and municipalities and townships and mosquito districts and water districts and on and on.

Good luck with that.

Yeah, the states with one exception have to appear to balance their budgets.  This quantitative easing is so incredible to me it left me laughing when I first read about it.  And we seem to be in a permanent state of easing, maybe drifting a bit tighter at times like now, but still the Fed's balance sheet is astonishing.

Of course, they can. But the people making $200K/year (for example) are moving out. In IL, that's $10K.

What replaces their state tax contribution? That's the money I'm talking about.

That will not be replaced, so what do states like IL, CA and NY do about it?

They need income, and it's not going to be replaced by those who are staying.

The outbound revenue loss charts I posted above clearly show this.

A. NY and especially CA, likely gain a slight edge with income transfers in from people coming from abroad.
B. IL might be boned.

That was one solid plus the Rs had back in the day.  It's pretty freaking simple - just keep it balanced each year and it can't snowball into some giant number that becomes cartoony and impossible to ever pay back.
But then the Rs ceased caring about it, too.
*I say that with the caveat that Rs from 1988-2008 put us further into debt than Ds did, by far. 

There's blame all across the board.

Illinois had R governors for years - 1977 through 2001. From 1994 on they cooked the books to make it look better. Even the SEC said as much. The Dot.com crash killed the fund further. The debt was then up to $45 Billion, in 2001. That opened my eyes to the problem.

Then in 2004 under Blago, they started with the pension holidays - using pension payments to fund other programs.

And here we are. Total pension liabilities in Illinois across all governments is close to $300 Billion.

I dimmed the lights when I left in 2020. Eventually they will go dark.

R or D - none of them care.

Population denity

Florida is going to sink into the water if we get more people here.

or the whole country could flip over

Nice day, quite windy, my wife wondered if the crane operators notice it.  The foregound is to be a 60 story condo building.  They finished demo and are going at the foundation for another crane or three.