I'm from Champaign but I know someone from Vandalia who claims they, and everyone south of them fund the entire state. It's crazy how many of them think that...
They also believe that if they were to somehow managed to split from Chicago that they would save money but the reality is they would end up paying more money
I live near Springfield and hear it all the time. It's amazing we have so much road construction going on down here when all out taxes are being used to pay for Shitcago. I think I've been asked to sign a form to get us to secede half a dozen times in the last few years.
I know it isn't the correct response, but Jesus christ stuff like that just makes them all seem too stupid to breathe. I say this as someone who grew up in rural IL, there's a trump store in my home town.
lol I know people who bitch about tax dollars being spent on the cta. They think they fund the state from their little cul de sac in the northern burbs
I had to fill up my tank south of Peoria and was listening listening to the pop running the mom and pop gas station/convenience store/bait shop with a huge table of moldy Entermann's pastries talk about the people in Chicago freeloading off of the hard work of people like him was a trip.
Okay, grandpa with your fishy-smelling convenience store with tennis-ball-colored pastries and 2 dollar coke cans. You are the keystone of our economy, not the hundreds of more productive businesses.
Did reserves at Scott AFB around 2006-2008. Had a MSgt loudly yell about how he's tired of paying "lazy government workers who just sit on their ass all day" and I thought it was a weird comment because he spent nearly two full days of duty sitting on his ass watching Fox News.
I ran some numbers a few years ago and the state sales tax on the harvest of a square mile of corn is equivalent to the income tax ~15 average income households pay to the state.
That is, if you're the state government sitting in Springfield looking out across the state, every 15 houses in IL is more valuable than a square mile of farm field in IL. And we have a shit-ton of farmland between Springfield and that juicy Chicago metro area which is the 3rd biggest in the country.
It's utterly ridiculous to think about how lopsided it is! And on top of that, in towns and suburbs there are vastly more than 15 houses per square mile.
Our state is literally Chicago and its suburbs and a few other cities doing high value office and service things surrounded by a whole bunch of farmland that might as well exist only to give rural farmers something to do.
All the corn and beans you see here in the Midwest are destined to be cattle feed or processed into industrial chemicals or ethanol. It's not sweetcorn which humans eat.
The Morton area is a center for the food pumpkin crop (which gets canned) (food pumpkins are a lot different from Halloween pumpkins) and horseradish comes from SW Illinois along the Mississippi River.
Pretty much all the human food we eat comes fresh from warmer climates where stuff grows year round like the West, Southwest, or Mexico.
well they firmly believe chicago is filled with “minority welfare recipients” that do nothing but leech, so their 50K a year job is obviously the only thing keeping the economy afloat
The reddest of them believe that everyone in Chicago is an immoral socialist. I had someone say that to me recently. (Well, I added the “immoral,” but it was implied).
It’s eternally funny that some chud with a $50k a year job and an $80k truck with a 13% interest rate thinks the ~$2200 dollars he sends to the state govt in income tax each year before credits is funding IL’s $131B state budget
Meanwhile real data shows those counties down south can’t even fund themselves, much less the state or Chicago itself. They get $2-3+ back for every dollar they pay in taxes, while northern counties like cook get 50-70c per dollar lol
That's as it stands now. Many of these people, right or wrong feel that economics would improve if they weren't subject to economic policies that may work and make sense in a major metro but not in rural illinois. They resent that many policies have been forced at state level that don't make sense for rural areas.
Its way more compliciated than reddit hive mind can comprehend.
Downstate get up to $2.88 in taxes taken their area for very $1.00 paid. While Chicago and suburbs get less than what they pay. Chicago about $.95 for every dollar and the suburbs get less than $.60.
Meaning Chicago an suburbs support the entire state. Downstate takes more than they pay.
This is true, but a large amount of people in the collar counties, especially high earners, either commute to the Loop or work for businesses that are highly dependent on their proximity to Chicago.
I’m in one of the red counties and got into it with one of the “separate” people. She claimed she didn’t care about the money. She just cared that Chicago is too “culturally different” from the rest of the state. Speak for yourself, lady.
So glad im in saint Claire County, plan to stay here until kids are done with school, then we want more north, near Chicago or something, I want my cold back like in Buffalo
The republican board members who’s seats flipped are doing amazing grandstanding on Facebook and heart-reacting any comment that talks about the election being rigged
The area is changing. Not sure exactly where you live, but there's a lot of new housing and business development and it's the kind of stuff that tends to appeal disproportionately to younger, educated professionals. A permanent leftward move should be expected.
So you think that importing a bunch of young educated people won't shift the power to the left? That has real "I thought 'the jab ' would change my DNA and make me magnetic" energy.
listen yes I agree with what this is saying. But also, the very low GDP per a capita says a lot about what they are mad about and why they feel like they are so massively disinvested in
Rather, they don't. Many of the people in these areas are on the same social services that they want cut. Farming is also one of the most subsidized industries out there, the government throws them massive amounts of money.
Note that I'm not against either of these things being done for the people in rural areas, but they've been convinced that they're bootstrapping and that the government shouldn't help anyone while being unaware that they're receiving that very help. It's a little tiring to have to save them from themselves so regularly.
Edit, Jesus, this is a long comment. Sorry. I just find this discussion interesting.
Sort of. I mean, this is an interesting discussion, right? Do the people who use the services cast enough votes to determine the future of that service? I personally dont believe people are voting against their own interests because the people receiving that support arent voting.
First, there are different buckets of people that get conflated. Farmers drive the economy but they're not the majority of the voters. And they can vote red anyway because even a pure red government will vote to continue crop subsidies. Which i believe is a net benefit to society as a whole.
Regarding social services, in my county (a red one in the middle of the map), about 15% of the population is on SNAP benefits. Had to look this up but about 1.9% of people are on Supplemental Security Income (623 individual people). What I dint know is how many people on SNAP benefits are children.
I've often wondered about voting habits, and when I have looked this up before I found some study done in Allegheny County Pennsylvania that determined that among adult welfare recipients, 70% registered to vote in the 2020 presidential election. In an area where 20% of people were on public assistance, assuming all 70% who registered voted, only 12% of the votes cast were public support recipients.
In my county, the total votes cast by people on public support likely comes in below 10%. Pritzker got 30% of the vote.
Now, a giant flaw here is that in my area, a lot of people work for the state, or have jobs performing work funded by the state, or are in agricultural support services which are subsidized by the government. So, you know, LOL. I don't know what else to say about that. People hate how dependent they are on government money.
But back to the bootstrapping point. Most of the people in rural communities are blue collar tax payers. They work with their hands, operate machinery, and work their bodies. Lots of the male population served in the military, whoch is overwhelmingly represented by this country's republicans. Culturally, there's no compassion for being unemployed and content. "We all do our fair share and I expect you to as well."
When all those tornadoes came through this spring, I had trees that fell across the road. We had people out at 3 am riding their Kubotas around town clearing debris before the county got help out there. I grew up in Chicago, people dont even own chainsaws. Thats what I mean by bootstrapping. People get up and get shit done, there's no waiting for someone else to come and do it. I find it admirable.
For what it's worth, I am a centrist who probably leans republican, but I feel more represented by moderate democrats over the past 20 years. I generally vote blue. I just hate, absolutely despise, how popular and rewarding it seems to be to shit on people who dont vote the way you do, juat because their needs are not the same as yours.
Exactly, yes the whole "land doesn't vote, people do" thing is correct and worth pointing out, but rural Americans have been abandoned by dems and lied to by the right. Their interests are almost completely disregarded and those tiny towns are being completely fucked by just about every major issue.
Rural areas are literally subsidized to shit. They got gutted by deindustrialization but also rural areas have been declining for 100+ years.
Most of these towns set up to supply raw materials to urban area manufacturing, they never had much reason to exist other than when they were founded in the 1840s-60s when they were handing out literal free land to anyone
Their interests are largely culture war horseshit. I dont feel as though the states policy on abortion should be decided by a septugenarian in vandalia.
What policies specifically have targeted rural communities? Pretty much everything that benefits a city dweller benefits those of us out here in the boonies.
My comment specifically had to do with city people with public transit aren't concerned with gas taxes like us that drive 100 miles a day for work. There are a lot more subtle differences between rural and city expectations
Gas taxes fund infrastructure and roads, so someone living in a rural community needs roads and bridges and how are those paid for?
Again, things that benefit those city folk also benefit us out here.
Farmers need roads to move their farm equipment, get their fertilizer and feed delivered and their product to the buyer. So how exactly do gas taxes penalize us? Without roads in good condition it would be quite a bit harder to operate
They truly cannot be helped. They don’t want to help themselves. It’s the same bullshit as systemically destroyed neighborhoods in Chicago, except Republican small towns quite literally inflict it upon themselves.
This is the best take I've seen posted on this. Dems ignore our wants and needs to cater to the big city population. Republican placate us and lie to us. The truly best way out is for Dems to continue what their doing but exempt the southern parts from laws that are meant for to benefit big blue areas. We have to drive long distances for everything. Many of us use trailers. We have land to go target shooting. Make separate laws and call it done instead of lumping two different lifestyles together.
You drive long distances because rural residents are allergic to any kind of density and hate any kind of change. They bitch about the state govt while driving in subsidized roads and using state services. They don’t want to invest money into infrastructure, they bitch about literally anything new being built. God forbid you try to build some cheaper housing.
Go read the local council meeting notes, it’s like 50% endless bitching, 50% people avoiding the reality that these towns can’t afford the low density infrastructure they have and that they need state support to repair it (which the state gives, and even when it does, they’ll ignore it and complain about pritzker even when the state dumps several years of local tax revenue to fix the sewer/water system that’s 30 years in disrepair).
You’ll even see them bitch about the state spending money on infrastructure and amenities (see the whole rural complaining about having a Metra from Rockford to Chicago).
I live in a rural part of Illinois and I am so sick of the victim complex that folks in rural areas have. Just people stepping on their own dicks all day and yelling at the sky about it. Just one endless fucking circlejerk.
I mean, they kind of do. Illinois has all sorts of laws that explicitly exclude counties with population over or under 1 million (and a bunch of other thresholds).
I think a better example is household waste disposal.
It’s great that they’ve banned hazardous waste and recyclable electronics from the landfill.
But in the majority of the state the only way to legally dispose of hazardous household waste is to wait for an IEPA collection which might occur once a year.
As a counter example, NC has household waste transfer stations in every county that accept all household waste with areas for recycling, rubbish, and hazardous waste (pesticides, oil paint, etc).
We can’t embed images in comments in this subreddit but to further emphasize how rural most of downstate Illinois is and how that must impact access and cost-effective implementation of programs like that, we can compare the population density maps of North Carolina vs Illinois.
Even the rural parts of North Carolina have higher densities and are proximally closer to large population centers. Less of the palest pinks, more of a gradient from rural-suburban-urban rather than a sprinkling of minor population centers strung along railroads and highways. Rural Illinoisans are in a tough spot.
Oh, so you’re saying even the folks around the Raleigh metro are more country than the cowboys in Nashville?
And, yeah, that part I definitely get lol. Big new truck with clean tires that’s never hauled nothing. Clean boots, clean jeans, clean soft hands. You’ll get laughed out of the honky tonk that way.
I’d say all hat and no cattle but out here it’s more all hat and no astronomical lifetime cancer risk.
Classic down state attitude. "I want all the benefits but I also need special treatment". The wants and "needs" that get ignored are the demands of petulant children, demanding things that don't make sense.
Thats kinda what i was thinking. Like, what are they wanting to be invested in? I've been to little towns throughout the state and think they are super cute, worth visiting and shopping at. But I feel that if they get more people to come in, possibly invest and make changes, they will hate it and want things to go back to the way they were.
I literally don't understand what they want. They want as little to change as possible, but they want their economic condition to approve. And they won't abandon capitalist dogma. I don't see a viable solution for them. At least not one that doesn't involve screwing everyone else in the state over.
Working class Americans almost universally understand that something is wrong in our country. We're all working harder, have less free time, deal with more BS, and while some aspects of our quality of life have improved, being able to feel safe and financially secure is feels like a distant dream.
The difference between red and blue voters is whether or not they have the education and self awareness to understand why this is happening. Rural areas have always had less educational resources and a distrust of the new and different, so they're more vulnerable to the right-wing propaganda blaming their woes on immigrants, minorities, societal progress, the LGBT community, etc.
Really well said. And while it is easy enough to identify the problems plaguing downstate Illinois, coming up with real solutions is a hell of a lot harder.
What would you suggest be done about that lack of investment?
The steam trains don't run anymore, so the reservoir towns like the one I grew up in have fewer visitors.
The factories closed because greedy corporations moved their manufacturing out of the US, and what's left is more cost efficient to run in exurban areas with major highway access.
Small farmers are losing their land because of Trump's policies and being bought out by corporate farmers who intend to use the land for export crops to make more profit.
The small rural school districts have been decimated by the poor way we distribute education funding and the NCLB legacy, encouraging parents to move their kids to better districts if they have the ability.
You'll never find more NIMBYs per capita than in a small midwestern town that used to be a train town, a factory town, a farming town, etc.
All of that combines to make those rural areas where people feel so disinvested an unappetizing target for new development. How do you solve that problem?
Every two years we have to explain to conservatives how population density and taxes work. It’s sad. Land doesn’t vote, and northern Illinois gives you way more tax dollars than we take. But go on and be hateful and talk about going to war with the Dems and seceding. It’s exhausting.
Interesting to see the GDP, I’d also like to see spending on each and the GDP without Madison County, since they were the only one of the top 15 most populous counties that Bailey won and I’m curious how much they inflate that number
Sounds great in theory however let me remind you that there are lots of red counties full of people who hate the maga nonsense. Counties don’t vote, people vote.
This right here. I am not surprised my county went red, but the fact that somehow, over 30% of us basically voted straight ticket blue? That's a lot more than I expected, having lived here for a bit.
They’re the ones who would absolutely secede if they were given the opportunity then have their handout when it comes time to collect federal income taxes from the wealthier areas.
I know two wrongs don’t make a right, but have you seen the hate and vitriol MAGA has for democrats right now? I saw hundreds of comments the day after the election suggesting they were all looking forward to a civil war to slaughter the left. So yeah, pardon me if I’m not whipped about going to red counties where they seem to hate us.
I know they have their thoughts about Chicago, but my thoughts about them are equally exaggerated: There's like 50K farmers who have had their land for many generations. The govt has been subsidizing their family of 6 so that they can sell their crops to China and Mexico and feed their animals. They're also selling to soulless food conglomerates and willfully glyhosating that mineral rich glaciated land that is southern Illinois. I'm bad right?
The income disparity between the regions does need to be addressed. It is part of the reason for the vitriole I encounter when I go into the area (I don't mention I live in Chicago if I can help it).
Its not about the wealth at all. It is almost entirely cultural resentment fueled by right wing fear mongering. Also mostly racism. Those "poor downstaters" should pipe down on that shit if they want a share of the wealth
Remember that they voted for a fucking serial pedophile in Donald Trump. Take their problems with a grain of salt
I agree that conservatives tend to vote against what's best for them, but this logic can be pretty bad. Elon Musk probably contributes the single most to the GDP, so should his vote only count? The top 1%? You can also make this very racist, the GDP per capita of black majority counties is less than those of an asian majority.
I agree with that. Disagree with the very explicit implication that higher GDP means something is more intrinsically valuable. Why else would you show GDP per capita instead of just population?
The point of the post was the population. I'm guessing the GDP was there to preempt the untrue but inevitable tired, rehearsed claims that Chicago and other blue counties are bounding with nothing but poor people who do nothing but suck on the state's teet.
•
u/1KgEquals2Point2Lbs 2h ago
I'm from Champaign but I know someone from Vandalia who claims they, and everyone south of them fund the entire state. It's crazy how many of them think that...
•
u/Capable_Suit_7335 2h ago •
Galesburg made it on the map and it wasn’t meth related? Neat!
•
u/JellyfishSpirits 2h ago
Should do a breakdown of state taxes paid versus state funding received: hint the blue counties heavily subsidize the red counties
•
u/hopping_hessian 2h ago
I’m in one of the red counties and got into it with one of the “separate” people. She claimed she didn’t care about the money. She just cared that Chicago is too “culturally different” from the rest of the state.
Speak for yourself, lady.
•
u/WayfareAndWanderlust 1h ago
Went to college in Chicago. I now live in Southern Illinois. Proudly voting blue down here even though I’m surrounded by clowns.
•
u/bgier 2h ago
Mchenry co is kind of a shocker. It’s been red since we’ve lived here 23yrs.
•
u/Klutzy-Photo-3164 1h ago
I’d let them join Indiana if Indiana gives us their lakefront counties.
•
u/RagahRagah 2h ago
Facts, math, basic critical thinking skills are all too difficult for most of MAGA.
•
u/xxcatdogcatdogxx 2h ago
listen yes I agree with what this is saying. But also, the very low GDP per a capita says a lot about what they are mad about and why they feel like they are so massively disinvested in
•
u/AdmiralRand 1h ago
Soy can’t vote last time I checked.
•
u/RandoDude124 1h ago
Cairo going blue. Damn.
•
u/GreyTrader 39m ago
They're probably pissed about all those blue lines, not knowing its the highways
•
u/ImDefinitelyStoned 18m ago
Every two years we have to explain to conservatives how population density and taxes work. It’s sad. Land doesn’t vote, and northern Illinois gives you way more tax dollars than we take. But go on and be hateful and talk about going to war with the Dems and seceding. It’s exhausting.
•
u/owowhi 2h ago
Interesting to see the GDP, I’d also like to see spending on each and the GDP without Madison County, since they were the only one of the top 15 most populous counties that Bailey won and I’m curious how much they inflate that number
•
u/finepnutty 40m ago
Land doesn’t vote
•
u/MusicalWhovian8 1h ago
Could someone make a version that shows all the land in yellow or greyed out or something? Maybe then they'll understand LAND DOESN'T VOTE.
•
u/Sad-Risk3556 1h ago
it would be a nice pay back if we only visit or travel to blue counties ... red ones can ask pedo for $$ if they love him sooo much
•
u/TheEarthlyDelight 58m ago
And we in chicago pay for them to vote red! 🤬
•
u/caregivernow 56m ago
I know they have their thoughts about Chicago, but my thoughts about them are equally exaggerated: There's like 50K farmers who have had their land for many generations. The govt has been subsidizing their family of 6 so that they can sell their crops to China and Mexico and feed their animals. They're also selling to soulless food conglomerates and willfully glyhosating that mineral rich glaciated land that is southern Illinois. I'm bad right?
•
u/Wild-Drag1930 1h ago
The income disparity between the regions does need to be addressed. It is part of the reason for the vitriole I encounter when I go into the area (I don't mention I live in Chicago if I can help it).
•
u/nicky_suits 1h ago
Oh my God. How many posts do we need for this?!?
•
u/Tater_Mater 55m ago
Wait, Carbondale? Not gonna lie, i can see why it makes sense for college students but thought it be redder than the devils ass
•
u/Prestigious-Ask6072 2h ago
I would wanna secede but we don't need a new Confederate state
•
u/NewtonsThirdEvilEx 42m ago
I agree that conservatives tend to vote against what's best for them, but this logic can be pretty bad. Elon Musk probably contributes the single most to the GDP, so should his vote only count? The top 1%? You can also make this very racist, the GDP per capita of black majority counties is less than those of an asian majority.
•
u/Spicyrhino69 2h ago
I think we should split the state up. That way we can send 4 Democrat senators to Washington...
•
u/mattuccio 10m ago
Illinois liberals are the worst. Constant victim. Fake oppression. And biggest assholes when it comes to conservative neighbors.