Come 2013, there will be one less congressman from Illinois.
Maybe that doesn’t rate more than a shrug. You’ve got other concerns. Maybe you think one less Illinois politician in Washington — a drop from 19 to 18 in the House delegation — is no tragedy.
But if you live in Illinois and you work in Illinois and you raise your kids in Illinois, this
does
concern you.
Over the course of the last decade, Illinois’ population inched from 12,419,293 to 12,830,632. That 3.3-percent growth rate ranked among the lowest nationwide, and was well below the national population increase of 9.7 percent.
Meanwhile, Texas, Florida, Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, South Carolina, Utah and Washington all gained representatives.
The loss of a congressional seat is a barometer of many things. But most of all it is a barometer of people making decisions — about themselves, their children and the kind of future that Illinois promises.
Would you come to a state that makes national headlines not only for the size of its estimated $15 billion deficit this fiscal year, but also for its political leaders’ inability to dig in and reform how they spend?
Would you come to a state where thousands of kids are doomed to dead-end classrooms, where bright school reforms struggle and the dim status quo often prevails?
Where public corruption investigations provide one of the few employment growth industries? Where too many people around the world now think of Illinois as the chronically corrupt Land of Blago?
Where some $130 billion in unfunded obligations for public employees’ retirement benefits may — unless lawmakers come to their senses — condemn taxpayers and their progeny to decades of tomorrows spent retiring today’s debt from yesterday’s commitments?
For too many people who have the choice to move, to relocate, to seek opportunities, or not to come here in the first place, the answer has become: of course not.
That is how the state’s clout ebbs away. Note the verb: ebbs. This happens slowly.
Most voters probably don’t remember that the state had 25 congressmen when President John F. Kennedy was inaugurated in 1961. After the 2012 election, it will have one fewer than it had in … 1873. Illinois’ House delegation peaked at
27
members from 1913 to 1943.
This latest decline isn’t about the loss of one job in Washington, no matter how much power and prestige it holds.
It’s about the loss of tens of thousands of jobs across this state over the past decade. Astonishing statistic: Illinois needs to create 600,000 jobs just to catch up to where it stood a decade ago.
The equation is simple: Jobs = people = political clout in D.C.
On Tuesday, after the U.S. Census Bureau announced the figures and the pols all started to buzz about who’s toast, we heard a term resurrected from jargon’s tomb: Rust Belt. That’s a throwback to the 1980s and ’90s, when huge population shifts from declining northern industrial states to the West and South prompted pundits to figure that cities like Chicago would join Detroit on the RIP list.
How wrong those predictions were.
Anyone who’s been to Chicago knows that this isn’t the buckle of the Rust Belt. It’s the mecca of Groupon and a thousand other brilliant ideas still incubating in the brains of entrepreneurs who come here, or who stay here.
The quest for more of that innovation and job creation — not lamely subsidizing employers with taxpayer dollars to move here from somewhere else — is why this page spends so much time and ink talking about concrete ways to improve Illinois. To fix its public finances, restructure its tax policies, encourage private employers, boost public education and shackle corruption.
Illinois can grow, and grow faster, if it attracts and retains productive people. Every state is in competition with every other state for that growth.
And, over the last decade, Illinois has been a loser. Not of population, but of … clout.
People make choices.
They’re choosing to go elsewhere.
Now … what will we do about it?
