That all sounds reasonable. Maybe i've stumbled onto some further undercurrent here. Have you asked, Porgie Tirebiter, what he thinks of this movement? Would guess he's not really into it, eh.
"Anecdotes abound. The makers VS takers argument never goes away."
These Illinois Republicans are rallying around a bill to kick deep-blue Chicago out of the state
The skyline of Chicago beyond a foggy Lake Michigan. (Jeff Haynes/Reuters)
By Liz Weber May 20
Brad Halbrook stood in front of a crowd of more than 1,600 people on March 10 in Effingham, Ill., roughly 200 miles south of Chicago. According to supporters who were there .. https://www.isra.org/News/TabId/1068/ArtMID/4612/ArticleID/37584/ISRA-Thursday-Bulletin-March-14-2019.aspx , the rallygoers went wild when Halbrook — a Republican state lawmaker — talked about his big idea: a resolution to separate Chicago and its 3 million residents from the state of Illinois.
If Halbrook and his supporters have their way, the 51st state would not be the District of Columbia or Puerto Rico. It will be the Windy City.
Halbrook, who represents a district east of Springfield, Ill., reintroduced a bill in February to create a new state around Chicago. According to Halbrook, there are eight co-sponsors, up from three when it was introduced last year. The bill has a long way to go; it needs at least 60 votes to pass the Illinois House of Representatives, to say nothing of the state Senate or the governor.
And yet the bill’s supporters are hopeful, pointing to a rising tide of frustration toward what they see as Chicago’s overstated influence in Illinois politics, namely around issues of gun rights, debt, immigration and abortion. After the 2018 election, Democrats now control the state Senate, House and governor’s office.
“This isn’t an idea that’s going to go very far,” said Steve Brown, spokesman for House Speaker Michael Madigan (D).
Yet the call for separation has picked up speed in part because of the work by grass-roots movements such as Illinois Separation .. https://theillinoisseparation.com/ .. and New Illinois .. https://www.newillinoisstate.org/ .. to spread the movement to the county level in the past year.
“The movement is building,” Halbrook said.
Collin Cliburn, 32, started the Illinois Separation blog in 2018. Cliburn, who is a carpenter and works on the separation movement part-time, has lobbied counties throughout the state to introduce a nonbinding resolution to the ballot.
“I want to show the legislature that this is truly what the people want, and the only way we can do that is through a nonbinding resolution,” he said. According to Cliburn, he’s seeing momentum for the nonbinding resolution in 20 out of the state’s 102 counties.
One county has already decided to put the issue to a vote. Effingham County, in southern Illinois, will include the question on the 2020 ballot.
G.H. Merritt, co-founder of New Illinois, said she was considering moving out of the state as she became increasingly unhappy with the new administration’s economic policies. “Then it hit me like a bolt of lightning,” Merritt said. “Why should we be the ones to leave?”
People outside of the metropolitan Chicago area feel as though they don’t have a voice anymore, Merritt said.
“Forty percent of the population live in Cook County, and they completely dominate state politics,” she said. “The other 60 percent have to dance to their tune.”
According to Halbrook, while Chicago is an economic force in the state, the rest of Illinois holds the key to its own economic success: agriculture. “One in 4 jobs is related to agriculture so there is another economic driver,” he said.
Merritt, who was formerly a nonprofit administrator, said it’s not really a “red, blue, Republican and Democrat thing. It’s an urban versus rural thing."
Many researchers and scholars see statehood movements like Illinois’s as a symptom of a growing division between large cities and rural communities. Similar movements in California and New York have crept into the mainstream, too.
“This is an idea that has been around and comes and goes,” said John Jackson, political professor emeritus at the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale .. https://paulsimoninstitute.siu.edu/ . “Especially if you have one or two big cities and a lot of rural areas.”
While Cook County and the five urban counties that surround Chicago have turned heavily Democratic, the rest of the state has grown more and more Republican, according to Jackson.
“It’s a way for conservative and Republican legislators to let up steam,” Jackson said. “It’s always popular downstate to run against Chicago.”
The problem isn’t unique to Illinois, according to Robert P. Jones, chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute .. https://www.prri.org/ , a nonprofit and nonpartisan research organization. Jones, a scholar on religion, culture and politics, said it’s particularly evident in states with a healthy, vibrant city center and a larger agricultural base. He attributes part of this national trend to younger generations who are moving out of rural areas, as well as an increase in ideological sorting.
“For younger people, there’s evidence that people are moving to fit their ideological and cultural identity,” Jones said.
According to the PRRI’s 2018 American Values Atlas .. http://ava.prri.org/ , the differences between Chicago and the rest of the state are stark. In Chicago, 53 percent of the population is white. In the rest of Illinois, that fraction is 73 percent. Roughly 28 percent of non-Chicago residents hold a college degree, while 36 percent of Chicagoans do.
[So as in Australia in places, and around the world, it's city v country, old v young, with a clash of religious and other, hmm, values tossed into the mix.]
While people might be paying closer attention to the divide between cities and rural communities now, the problem isn’t new, according to Jones. “It’s been a long-term trend, this isn’t the last five to 10 years,” he said. “It’s been the last couple of generations.”
A 2018 Pew Research Center study .. https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/05/22/what-unites-and-divides-urban-suburban-and-rural-communities/ .. on the similarities and differences between rural and urban communities found the divide fell almost strictly along partisan party lines, according to senior researcher Ruth Igielnik. While there have always been more Democrats than Republicans in urban areas, there’s been a stronger concentration in the past 10 years, Igielnik said. “Twice as many voters identified as Democrats than Republicans in urban communities,” she said.
“It was really divisive,” Igielnik said. “We really didn’t see many political similarities.”
Back in Illinois, Merritt said the proposal was more than a conversation starter. It’s a movement of people who are “willing to fight for our home,” she said.
All that brings to mind two other separation movements close to home.
Quebec sovereignty movement The Quebec sovereignty movement (French: Mouvement souverainiste du Québec) is a political movement as well as an ideology of values, concepts and ideas that advocates independence for the Canadian province of Quebec. P - Several diverse political groups coalesced in the late 1960s in the formation of the Parti Québécois, a provincial political party. Since 1968 the party has appealed for constitutional negotiations on the matter of provincial sovereignty, in addition to holding two provincial referendums on the matter. The first, which occurred in 1980, asked whether Quebecers wished to open constitutional negotiations with the federal government (and other provinces) for the intended purpose of establishing a "sovereignty-association" pact between the province of Quebec and the rest of Canada. Approximately 60% of Quebec's voting public rejected the idea put forth by Parti Québécois leader René Lévesque. The matter was dropped by the party for most of the 1980s, especially after the patriation of the Canadian constitution without the consent of the Parti Québécois government, and the creation of the federal Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which enshrined the protection of the French language and French-Canadian culture in Canada. In 1995, after two failed attempts by the Mulroney government to secure Quebec's ratification of amendments to the constitution, the Parti Québécois held a second referendum, though on this occasion the question was whether one wished for the independence of the province of Quebec from the rest of Canada. The response was again in the negative, though this time by a far closer margin, with 50.58% against the proposal. .. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_sovereignty_movement
Secessionism in Western Australia Secessionism has been a recurring feature of Western Australia's political landscape since shortly after British settlement in 1829. The idea of self governance or secession has often been discussed through local newspaper articles and editorials and on a number of occasions has surfaced as very public events including a State referendum in 1933. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secessionism_in_Western_Australia
People don't leave Darien or Greenwich Connecticut because of taxes. Connecticut is a very expensive state to live in.
In Darien and Greenwich, people's wealth ticks up and down via their portfolios, and those in the nested yacht set (as well as the mere "very wealthy" people) have only a vague idea of their actual net worth.
By all means though, let's give them a tax cut. They worked so hard for their lucre.
Market Data 
Markets 
AI
