•April 27, 2016•

By Jim Nowlan
NP Guest Columnist

More than a couple of my acquaintances have told me in recent months they plan to leave our state as soon as they can. And now a Chicago Tribune story reports that 3,000 “millionaires” (net worth not including primary residence) left that city last year on a net basis, more than any city in the nation.

What’s going on? As your faithful inquiring columnist, I looked into matters.

In the latter half of the 19th Century, Chicago and Illinois were for a while the fastest growing jurisdictions in the world.

Great swaths of fecund farmland beckoned settlers, and Chicago entrepreneurs such as Swift and Armour employed thousands in butchering livestock and marketing our products to the world. [For a marvelous history of the countryside-city synergy, see William Cronon’s masterful work about “Nature’s Metropolis.”]

Yet since the 1920s, Illinois has suffered domestic net out-migration almost every year of folks (more U.S. residents moving out than in, net), with the rate ratcheting up in the 1970-80s to almost one percent net outflow per year and once again to that rate since 2010.

This is according to talented researchers Mike Klemens and Natalie Davila, who recently sliced and diced our national demographic trends, especially as they apply to the Prairie State.

Using IRS data, Klemens and Davila find that in 2012-13 there was a net loss of 10,500 IRS tax exemptions to Texas followed by 7,700 to Florida and 8,500 combined to California and Arizona.     Login or Subscribe to read the rest of this story.