And if you dig deeper into the numbers, it's the folks that make more money, right? It's the, I would call them upper middle class that are leaving.

So the data show that literally every single age and income group that the IRS reports is leaving.

However, those who are making more money are leaving at the fastest rates, right? When we adjust for each of those groups' population size, the people who are making above $200,000 a year leave twice as fast as those who are making lower incomes than that.

However, every age and income demographic reported by the IRS experienced outmigration during this time.

People, according to your story out this morning, people continue to leave the state.

Yeah, that's true.

People do.

I think that there have been a lot of, obviously, politics involved with the narrative around migration and what's happening.

It seems to make sense to me, and this is Bryce Hill from the Illinois Policy, and you can certainly correct me if I misspeak here, but if we had more businesses in Illinois, per se, and they weren't leaving to go to other places that are more favorable to them, wouldn't you think that the burden wouldn't be so reliant upon residents to just keep getting hit harder and harder and harder over and over again?

Absolutely, that's 100% true.

This is actually really a post-COVID trend.

This is a five-year trend where we've seen now the increases be disproportionately going to residential instead of commercial.

Property taxes in Cook County are actually set up so that commercial properties pay two and a half times more in effective property tax rates than residential property.

However, because those values of commercial property are not growing, they're actually still declining, especially in the city of Chicago, and they're growing very slowly in the suburbs and surrounding areas.

Because of that slow growth, coupled with much higher growth in residential home values that we've seen over the past few years, driven a lot by inflation, we've seen the shift in where property tax burdens go with those annual increases.

This pension debt is too high.

What do you make of that argument that investing in the roads ends up saving passengers or drivers time and money in the long run?

I think having high quality infrastructure is obviously a benefit to everybody.

That's why the tollway already spends so much money on its infrastructure already.

We also need to consider that these construction projects are causing some of that congestion.

So some of that lost time is because of this construction.

We've seen many of these areas already being under repair in recent capital plans or even actively right now.

So some of it would be contributing to additional congestion, but Beyond that, I think that, again, we've had less than two months of consideration for the entire plan.

It sounds like you don't trust that they are going to deliver the economic benefits that they're promising.

So a lot of them probably get a taste of what's going on and get the crap out again.

Yeah, absolutely.

And all the numbers that we talk about with migration are on net.

So those are measuring people moving in minus those moving out, and we just look at whatever that net figure is.

So it takes into account, of course, some people are moving into Chicago.

Many more people are moving out.

You often see some new grads from college moving to the city for their first job opportunities.

So why can't Illinois look at what we're doing and do some of the same thing?

But this corporate tax hike, you're going to run some of them out.

Absolutely.

One of the big tax hikes, $300 million in this budget is a cap on what's known as net operating losses.

It's meant to allow companies who have been recently losing money to write off those losses in future years.

Some of the corporate tax code stays even.

Every single state, the federal tax code, everybody has it.

Virtually nobody caps it.

It's not even their company to tax.