https://reason.com/2020/01/02/illinois-spent-the-last-decade-losing-population-and-learning-nothing/
You have to wonder whether anybody there made the connection between the state's dropping unemployment rate and the state's drop in population.
And if they're hoping marijuana tax revenues will make up for the massive budget holes, Illinois is in for a major disappointment. Tax demands for legal marijuana providers in Illinois are extremely high, and pot prices will likely be double those of nearby Michigan (which has also launched legal recreational sales). Illinois' weed taxes aren't quite as high as the ones in California, but it's still notable that the Golden State's high taxes mean the state is bringing in less than a third of its projected tax revenues from legal sales. Indeed, in California around 80 percent of all marijuana sales are still on the black market.
The Illinois authorities are predicting $57 million in tax revenue for the first six months of marijuana sales, and they expect to get $500 million annually within five years. That's probably not a reasonable expectation, given what's happening in California. And in any event, that much revenue is just a drop in the bucket of the state's estimated $137 billion in pension obligations.
Illinois spent much of 2010 serving as a warning that states cannot tax themselves into prosperity and cannot thrive by using so much of their budget to line the pockets of government employees. Will this be the decade that the state learns its own lessons?
I doubt it, as long as they keep electing big government uni-party shills.
Step one, as one of the comments posits, is for the state of Illinois to secede from Cook county.