As Illinois Enters a Death Spiral, One Brilliant Reporter Has an Original Idea: Eliminate the State
The state of Illinois is facing fiscal insolvency the likes of a Third World country.
The state has $14 billion in unpaid bills, businesses, and residents are fleeing and the Midwestern state may just become the first U.S. state in history to have its debt declared “junk status.”
Times are dire for the Land of Lincoln and Reagan. Politicians in the state are playing a dangerous political and fiscal game of Russian roulette.
How will it end?
One genius reporter named John Kass has a brilliant idea. Writing for the Chicago Tribune, Kass argues for a permanent solution to Illinois’s problems: Eliminate the state.
Kass explains in his column last week:
Dissolve Illinois. Decommission the state, tear up the charter, whatever the legal mumbo-jumbo, just end the whole dang thing.
We just disappear. With no pain. That’s right. You heard me.
The best thing to do is to break Illinois into pieces right now. Just wipe us off the map. Cut us out of America’s heartland and let neighboring states carve us up and take the best chunks for themselves.
The group that will scream the loudest is the state’s political class, who did this to us, and the big bond creditors, who are whispering talk of bankruptcy and asset forfeiture to save their own skins.
What is the rationale for such a dire act? Kass, an Illinois resident, says there is just no sunlight in sight for the state’s future:
The alternative is hell. Illinois hasn’t had a state budget for years. The state continues to spend money it doesn’t have, and the state’s credit ratings have dropped, increasing the cost of borrowing more money we don’t have to keep the rotten shebang going.
Bills pile up; Moody’s Investor Service says taxpayers are on the hook for $251 billion in unfunded public union pension liabilities.
Since our neighboring states are doing better, taking Illinois jobs and businesses and Illinois workers and taxpaying families, they might as well just take the rest of Illinois, too, dammit.
Kass goes on to explain, in detail, the different lands that would be created by the auctioning off of the state to its bordering neighbors. I encourage you to read the descriptions and admire their thoughtfulness. In case there are parts of the state that no one wants (and we can’t blame them) Kass argues for a “Mad Max” approach:
If there are portions of Illinois that the other states don’t want, they may be left as federal territory, a wilderness where only the strong survive and peasants and friendly propagandists kneel and beg for crumbs.
I will give away my bias now, speaking as a proud Iowan, I think this plan is great.
Iowa just — please, God — don’t take Springfield.
Source: Conservative Daily