My friend and colleague Scott Moody released a paper earlier this week. It looks at IRS data that tracks, down to the county, where people are choosing to move (to and from):
- On a net basis, 1 taxpayer left Illinois every 10 minutes between 1995 and 2009.
- These 806,000 people took to other states more than $26 billion in taxable income.
- In 2009 alone, Illinois lost 40,000 people to 43 other states. That figure is akin to half of the population of Decatur moving to another state in a single year.
Illinois lost people to every one of its border states.
The IRS data lags more than a year. So it doesn’t even tell us how the tax hike in January impacted outmigration. Coincidentally, not one but two other studies were released right after Scott’s that contain 2011 information from other data sources. From the AP:
United Van Lines has been tracking moving trends since 1977. Its study released to The Associated Press on Wednesday looked at all moves that involved either going to or leaving a state or the District of Columbia…For 2011, United tracked 113,916 interstate moves from Jan. 1 through Dec. 9. For the fourth year in a row, Washington, D.C., had the highest percentage of inbound moves, 62.2 percent…Illinois and New Jersey tied for the largest outbound migration, with 60.5 percent of moves involving those states heading out.
So for every two people renting vans to move to Illinois, there are three renting vans to move out. Not good.
Census data was released as this week as well. Wendell Cox, an Illinois native whose also a visiting colleague at the Illinois Policy Institute, has a great summary of that data:
Illinois: Illinois had the second-highest net domestic migration loss, sending 79,000 of its residents to other states. Illinois had ranked 49th in net domestic migration in the previous decade, with a 615,000 loss. Unlike the other biggest losers, New York and California, the Illinois rate in the single year of 2011 exceeded its annual rate of net domestic migration loss between 2000 and 2009.
So Scott Moody’s analysis of IRS data showed that outmigration trends slowed a bit in 2009, a likely result of the fact that people could not sell their houses in order to move. Now the Census data suggest that Illinois’s exodus of people is picking up steam.
This is the biggest crisis facing Illinois. Ideology doesn’t matter: people are good for a place, and Illinois needs more people living and working here. Either you’re for reversing this trend, or you’re for watching people leave this state. My thought: preserving the same tired policies of the last 20 years is not going to stop people from leaving.