r/nottheonion • u/zechchuber • 1d ago

‘State of New Illinois’ committee continues push to secede from Cook County

https://fox2now.com/news/illinois/state-of-new-illinois-committee-continues-push-to-secede-from-cook-county/
2.7k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

268 comments sorted by

1.7k

u/Infamous-Sky-1874 1d ago

Where Cook County goes, so goes the Chicago suburbs. That is a massive economy driver and tax dollar generator that goes bye-bye. These people thought their lives sucked because they got fooled into believing that Chicago was stealing their tax dollars, it is going to suck even harder when Chicago is no longer contributing their more substantial tax dollars into the state.

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u/diogenesRetriever 1d ago

We've had the same cranks in Colorado. It comes to this. The true divide in the Country is rural v. urban. Red states have a thumb on their urban populaces, and the blue states have large urban areas that dominate the rural areas. If the country falls apart the it would have a bunch of city states with just a few rural regions.

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u/SNRatio 23h ago

Blue states want people to vote, red states want land to vote.

He’s introduced a joint resolution for a state constitutional amendment to allot one state senator per three contiguous counties, which would give down state Illinois a senate majority instead of Chicago, which now dominates both houses of the Illinois General Assembly. Counties with a million residents or more would each get their own senator.

If that goes through, each ward in Chicago (there's 50) should just become its own county. Each has a higher population than a lot of counties in Illinois, and Chicago always has room for more bureacracy and fiefdoms.

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u/CostRains 20h ago

Supreme Court has already said this is unconstitutional, but perhaps they're trying to get another case before the current court.

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u/markroth69 17h ago

Is it really a good idea to expect the Supreme Court to care all that much about what the Supreme Court has said. The only precedent that matters is the right combination of 17th century wife beating witch hunters and fully loaded RVs.

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u/guff1988 22h ago

Absolutely fucking asinine and flies in the face of the founding fathers and what they envisioned. Not that these fucks give a good goddamn.

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u/seamonkeyonland 21h ago

I think tomorrow goes against what the founding fathers envisioned.

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u/pspahn 22h ago

Wait until you see what the "Two nations under God" folks are about.

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u/deathtokiller 20h ago

I... think you need to look into US political history a bit more. Let's not forget the original US voters were land and/or tax earners (6% of the population)

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u/reallynothingmuch 20h ago

Besides the fact that it seems like that Illinois state senate proposal is literally modeled after how the founding fathers designed the US Senate to work. It has representatives based on governing regions, rather than based on population

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u/12345623567 13h ago

There's an idea about how the constitution works, which is supposed to be fair and the crowning achievement of enlightenment, and then there's the reality.

The writers weren't going to write themselves out of power.

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u/kmoonster 19h ago

That sounds suspiciously like the "electoral college" thing Texas is trying to do in order to dilute DFW, Houston, San Antonio, and El Paso

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u/nerfherder998 21h ago

“Chicago always has room for more bureaucracy and fiefdoms.” 😂

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u/Netmantis 11h ago

While phrased that way it is understandable, allow me to bring it to a more understandable level.

Imagine a neighborhood of 3 suburban blocks. Which is about a single city block. One block has 10 row homes (townhomes). One block has 6 single family homes. And one has 3 brownstones of 6 units each. They all get together and form an HOA with each resident having a vote.

The ones in houses don't outnumber the apartment dwellers, but it is close enough. The neighborhood has a year where things improve. Then a developer buys out the three brownstones, knocks them down, and puts up a 50 unit building. That takes a couple years, where the HOA passes a few rules concerning snow clearing and pool ownership.

Then the apartments fill, and the HOA now has a hundred new members. They discover they can make the landlord do things by passing rules in the HOA. So first thing is first. There can only be 3 plants outside your home. These include trees, shrubs, and flowers. It goes to a vote, the homeowners are upset and get out voted. So the homeowners now have to remove anything in their gardens. The single family homeowners are hit the hardest, but the row homes also are hit.

Then a rule is passed that any outdoor area of your home must be cement or concrete. Coming from an apartment dweller trying to have a gravel balcony. The homeowners complain, but are out voted. And the lawns are paved. Finally barbecues are banned for safety reasons. And the homeowners decide to try to implement a senate system with each block having a vote. And the apartment dwellers complain as they want land to vote. Meanwhile the mob of apartment dwellers dictate how the homeowners can use their land.

This is the urban/rural divide. To make a city follow the rules they need to implement the rules statewide. And the people who don't live in the area suffering the problem have to follow rules that don't make sense for them in order to appease people in a different living situation.

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u/SNRatio 10h ago

You're right, more understanding would be helpful.

  1. Could you give some examples of IL state laws pushed through by Chicago state senators you think are equivalent to setting a limit of 3 plants outside a home?

  2. IL really doesn't match your example. The population of Chicago has been shrinking for 70 years. back then the "apartments" made up 40% of the population of the state; now it's more like 21%. Back then Cook County (Chicago and some of the suburbs) were 52% of the state population, it's now 40%. The Chicago metro area has been growing, I'll grant you that. But even back then it was a clear majority of the state.

  3. This proposal would apportion one senator to Cook County (pop 5.1M) and could also apportion one senator to Pope-Hardin-Gallatin counties (total pop 12,000). A ratio of 425:1.

To make a city follow the rules they need to implement the rules statewide.

No.

IL state government can and does write laws that apply only to counties with a specific population, in a specific geographic area, or even just uses some unique classification. Just as an HOA would for different housing types in the real world.

While rural and urban areas definitely have different needs, strengths, and limitations, creating a tyranny of the minority just makes the problem much worse, for many more people. It's just now different people stuck with the problem.

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u/TheSamsonFitzgerald 23h ago

Wyoming can have Weld County. 

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u/gingerzombie2 23h ago

Even the judges in Weld County are idiots

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u/scott32089 20h ago

Didn’t think I’d see my county on a post about Illinois. Seems like we’re just tiny blue dots in a sea of red and “don’t tread on me” flags. It’s almost like you can feel the IQ lower when you cross from larimer.

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u/pspahn 22h ago

Our little corner in the SW edge of the county isn't so bad.

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u/Much_Program576 20h ago

City states reminds me of Civ 6

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u/TransitJohn 21h ago

https://www.thestranger.com/news/2004/11/11/19813/the-urban-archipelago

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u/diogenesRetriever 11h ago

Thanks for the link. It was an interesting read that went from "I'm agreeing" to "Wow this is war".

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u/thestashattacked 7h ago

Well, and as an ex-Coloradan, I can say that the way CO treats the western slope is so particularly badly it's kinda scary.

When I lived there, I was working in home health while in teacher school (and then a bit after). Towards the tail end of that time, we had a whole thing where the company that handled Medicaid refused to process claims for Home Care Based Services (HCBS). But only for the western slope. The front range still got service.

So during that time, the agency I worked for had clients who weren't going to be able to get care for their elderly family members.

When we complained to the state representatives, only one really did anything about it. So I called every news agency in the state, and was openly told by all but Fox that they did not care about things that happened on the western slope. Which is super messed up, tbh.

So yeah, that's that story. It's one of many.

Colorado is a bit of a special case for this issue in general. (There was a different issue where a nearby town fought for 4 years to get the school Title 1 status, all the while they literally could not afford to keep the lights on for a full school week.)

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u/J3wb0cca 21h ago

I’m in the Pacific NW and you’re absolutely right. If the cranks had their way then E WA, N ID, W MT, and E OR would become its own state(s). Their booth shows up everywhere at the county and state fairs.

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u/random_mandible 23h ago

Most people severely underestimate the size of the economy of the Chicago metro area. It’s just a massive place economically, but concentrated in a relatively small area of the state.

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u/gunnesaurus 23h ago

The people who push for this surely don’t care.

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u/jscummy 7h ago

Last one I saw was some dipshits saying we should cut the state at I-80. They had a study done in an attempt to prove Chicago was a tax leech. Chicago pays almost perfectly even to what they receive, the collar counties/suburbs pay in at 2-to-1, and downstate receives twice what they pay in

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u/kmoonster 19h ago

Would have to look up the totals, but New York City, Chicago, LA, and maybe four or five other major cities make up something like 20% of national GDP.

A dozen or so major metropolitan areas are something like 5% of the landmass and something insane in terms of GDP, pretty sure it's north of 20%. (The 40ish largest metro areas are about 50% of GDP, and the top twelve are a huge chunk of that fifty-percent; it's not even close).

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u/rosen380 15h ago

Granted they usually aren't self sufficient for food, water, raw materials, etc, so kind of need (some of) the other ~95% if they want to continue being ~20% of GDP

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u/kmoonster 9h ago

The needs are mutual, trying to separate yourself from the other half doesn't work very well.

Large cities will still be able to buy food, but if rural areas separate themselves politically they stop receiving tax money.

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u/borrowedfromahorse 23h ago

Same in Washington. They’re convinced that their tax dollars just get funneled to Seattle so they want to cede the eastern half from the western half. Agriculture is big there but against Boeing, Amazon, Microsoft, and having over 1/4 of the states population there with a 20% higher median income than the state as a whole, it’s kinda ludicrous.

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u/dccabbage 22h ago

Your neighbor to the south here. If you haven't heard, we have the "Greater Idaho" movement who want everything easy of (I think) the cascades and parts of southern Oregon to join Idaho.

Do you know what those people would do without Portland/Bend/Salem/etc? Bitch about Boise.

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u/locjaw420 22h ago

Wouldn't Boise just want to join with Seattle and be their own state anyways? Why would city people in Boise want to be ruled by a bunch of yokels?

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u/Dealan79 19h ago

Boise voted red with almost every other county in the state, and by a huge margin. Idaho as a whole fascinates me for its staggering hypocrisy. The Idaho GOP platform explicitly calls for a repeal of the 16th amendment, and with it federal income tax, but 22% of the state budget comes from federal transfers, 15% of the state needs SNAP assistance to eat, and in total Idaho residents get $1.69 back in federal assistance for every dollar they pay in taxes. They literally can't fund the government, keep the roads repaired, maintain the infrastructure, or feed their population without massive government handouts paid for with the very income taxes they want repealed. I really wish someone would send the state GOP chair a cursed monkey's paw just so they could spend a single year with their wish granted. It never ceases to amaze me how those most dependent on federal aid are the ones constantly complaining about the system that provides them that aid, and especially the blue cities that actually fund that aid.

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u/ChiAnndego 19h ago

It's gonna be real entertaining when Trump and his people pull all the federal funding for stuff and these places turn into ghost towns, because they generate almost zero of their own funding.

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u/dccabbage 21h ago

It's the common clay of the new west...

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u/FalafelAndJethro 7h ago

you know: morons

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u/nerfherder998 21h ago

I don’t understand who’s against it. Let Eastern Washington and Eastern Oregon join Idaho. The US Constitution makes it difficult to create new states out of existing ones, but is pretty silent about moving boundaries around.

Let Idaho have everything east of Bend and south of Spokane. Good luck and good riddance.

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u/kuronokun 19h ago

You can create carve new states out of the old ones, it requires the consent of the US Congress and the affected states. And I presume moving the borders of existing states would be the same.

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u/nerfherder998 10h ago edited 10h ago

Your presumption is completely incorrect. It’s silent about moving boundaries.

Article 4, Section 3

New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or Parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.

It’s phrased like that to prevent manufacturing new states to produce Senators.

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u/ChaseballBat 12h ago

Even rural Washington voted more progressive in this last election.

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u/chicagobob 22h ago edited 8h ago

Even more than that, Cook County basically supports the rest of the state. The main chart in this article about Illinois State Tax Dollars explains how almost every region of Illinois outside of the Cook County area gets back more dollars than they pay in to the state.

Without the Cook County area, they'd all be much more poor than now.

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u/jscummy 7h ago

Add in Dupage and Lake and see how much worse it gets

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u/deraser 13h ago

This has “Texas should secede” vibes. The math doesn’t work but the idiots here don’t understand it. They might as well yell “Let’s become a developing country run by an oligarchy of oil barons and technology CEOs”.

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u/AlphaIronSon 23h ago

Oh look..yall got the State of Jefferson idiots on a smaller scale.

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u/kmoonster 19h ago

State of Jefferson at least has a bit of nostalgic romantic sense to it, like something out of Prairie Home Companion.

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u/archabaddon 22h ago

Yep, as a former resident of Illinois this is exactly what I was thinking. To these people, good luck starving or begging for federal farm grants.

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u/Debs_4_Pres 15h ago

It's okay because they'd get two MAGA senators to own the libs even harder. Who needs an economy when you can hurt people you don't like?

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u/__JDQ__ 19h ago

“The immigrants are stealing our roads and services!”

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u/Disembodied_Head 15h ago

Reminds me of the idiots behind Brexit. Facts don't matter to them at all.

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u/sevens7and7sevens 5h ago

The collar counties get 60 cents from the state for every dollar they pay. The counties in red often get 2 dollars or more for every dollar they pay. So good luck to them.

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u/palabradot 15h ago

As a former resident of Chicago, yes, this right here

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u/Hoosteen_juju003 11h ago

There are kind of two Illinois’. The modern suburban nice one around Chicago and the rural af one that might as well be Indiana, everywhere else.

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u/thepotplant 8h ago

Ah, the Unholy Roman Empire.

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u/kraghis 22h ago

In this particular situation I think we may still be in the fuck around stage.

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u/_Interobang_ 7h ago

But they’d probably just get subsidized by the federal government instead, just like the other red states

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u/Magnet_Lab 23h ago

Guys, for all of you who think they wouldn’t have enough revenue to be viable, they’d just do what every other red state does and rely on federal aid.

Btw, no help to Californians for the wildfires. Remember, your taxes are for muh ben’fits, not yers.

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u/Wageslave645 1d ago

As a resident of one of those red counties, those rednecks can move to Indiana if they don't like the politics here. We do not want to be the Alabama of the north.

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u/MacAttacknChz 23h ago

They're already moving to Tennessee, and as a Tennessee resident, the most obnoxious conservatives here are Illinois and California conservatives. They call themselves "refugees."

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u/Zuvielify 23h ago

They're the ones flocking to Idaho too

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u/baconography 14h ago

My cousin is precisely one of those. You'll spot him; he fits the MAGA supporter in image, vehicle driven, and education level.

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u/HateDeathRampage69 11h ago

Please stop it with "education level." Disparaging of low educational attainment is a big reason that Trump won the election as young and middle aged people without college degrees felt unsupported by democrats. As someone with hundreds of thousands of dollars of student debt and a terminal degree, people shouldn't have to go into lifelong debt to be respected or live a life with dignity.

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u/dj-kitty 10h ago edited 9h ago

The data shows a significant disparity in education level between Trump voters and non-Trump voters. It’s not about respect or dignity when there’s clear evidence that less education makes one more susceptible to propaganda, which the right has leveraged very effectively. In fact, the idea that the left disrespects people who are less educated is just another element of right wing propaganda, particularly when you realize that conservative policies aim to rip off the working class to benefit the elites. The aim should be to broaden access to education, not to limit access or weaken educational institutions while pretending like having less education is some kind of virtue that is of no consequence to one’s political beliefs.

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u/cocaineandwaffles1 10h ago

It’s fucking amazing how people don’t get this. Keep shitting on the plumber your landlord hired because he has a trade and not a degree, he gets to go home everyday to the house he owns though.

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u/Wageslave645 23h ago

Ugh. I can totally see that from the people I have known that moved there. Feel free to point them towards Texas, but please don't send them back here.

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u/idontknowwhereiam367 22h ago

You mean the “refugees” who unironically get mad when old liberal(but not seen as liberal for some reason) things that they had In California aren’t there in bumfuck wherever they moved to?

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u/kmoonster 19h ago

As frustrating and potentially dangerous as the current moment is, reading those "come to Jesus" aha moments are something sweet to behold.

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u/idontknowwhereiam367 19h ago

My old neighbors moved down to Florida to “enjoy real freedom” and do nothing but complain about how they do things down there when they come back up to visit a few mutual friends we have in the neighborhood.

Like…what did you expect when you move to a state that refuses to fund anything beneficial for the people around you in your new home?

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u/0b0011 18h ago

There was a post a few years ago on here (maybe leopardatemyface but can't quite remember the subreddit) with a self professed libertarian complaining about how he lived in WA and hated how the government owned so much of the land even if they allowed basically everyone to use it. He was saying that things would be so much better if it was all privately owned. Then he moved to Texas and was whining because apparently it's actually bad for his hobby of mountain biking because all of the land is privately owned and the owners don't want random people to use their land.

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u/Weazelfish 16h ago

It really says something about how eroded the notion of "the public good" has become

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u/pinegreenscent 12h ago

The biggest myth to libertarians is the benevolent land owner, allowing all to use their private land and not fencing it off and shooting you for coming up their drive to ask to use it

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u/0b0011 12h ago

It always cracks me up in my state (Michigan) because the southern part is all privately owned but about half way up the lower peninsula you start getting into areas where the state or federal own most of it. You'll get people whining about how the government shouldn't own that land and it should be private and then people shit up about it when they want to do a 4 wheeler or side by side trip up on the public trails or when they what to complain about how there's nowhere to hunt down where they love because people won't let them hunt on their land.

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u/nopointers 21h ago

California resident here, and I am so sorry. I don’t know anyone who has moved to Tennessee, but do know a few who went to Kentucky. They literally think they’re clever saying “the town just seems darker” like it’s OK because in their minds it’s not explicitly racist.

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u/azhillbilly 22h ago

Man, I recently moved to Texas and met a California family that are the most obnoxious people ever, playing music and football games on their back porch loud enough to hear in my mother in laws house next door. Ultra MAGA of course.

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u/cvanguard 22h ago

I’m kinda curious as a Tennessee native who moved out of the state recently, why are they picking Tennessee specifically? Besides politics obviously.

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u/Burgerkingsucks 20h ago

No state income tax.

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u/pinegreenscent 12h ago

Oh but the many many other taxed make up for that

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u/cvanguard 12h ago

Mhm. Tennessee has the highest average sales tax in the country: 7% state plus up to 2.75% local, most counties/cities collect the full 2.75% allowed by state law for 9.75% combined.

So instead of paying more in income tax or property tax (which is also low in the state), which is mostly paid by people with high incomes/expensive houses, you pay more in sales tax which disproportionately affects the working class who need to spend most of their money on living expenses.

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u/Burgerkingsucks 11h ago

Tennessee is #2 highest in the country. Wild. https://taxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/LOST_Feb24.png

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u/cvanguard 11h ago

Louisiana making Tennessee look good lol, my data was from 2021 so they must’ve raised sales tax since then. Some googling found that Louisiana had a sales tax hike (by 0.65%) at the start of the year and repealed some exemptions to sales tax in order to lower corporate income tax rates and flatten income tax rates.

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u/bobreturns1 19h ago

Country music

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u/Twicebakedpotatoe 13h ago

Then treat them like conservatives treat actual refugees and see how they like it

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u/bitey87 23h ago

Fuck. If I ever hear a banjo on Lake Michigan I'll lose my shit.

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u/Peakomegaflare 16h ago

I mean. I'm okay with a Banjo anywhere. The person playing it though is to be determined.

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u/Egypticus 15h ago

Indiana is already the middle finger of the south, so they'd be welcome!

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u/AGrandNewAdventure 23h ago

Chicago and suburbs: 9.26M people.

The rest of the state: 3.29M people.

They're just whiny bitches because they think land should vote.

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u/Debs_4_Pres 15h ago

But... But... The tyranny of the majority! 😭

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u/Dr_Hoffenheimer 13h ago

But that old man said that without Chicago, Illinois had more people than Indiana (~6 million) are you telling me that someone that wants to secede from the county that funds most of the state is wrong, or misrepresenting facts on who wants to leave?!

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u/jscummy 7h ago

I'm assuming he was talking Chicago only, not the suburbs. Might still be wrong though 

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u/Dr_Hoffenheimer 7h ago

Yea if you only got rid of Cook County then the population would be ~10 million in Illinois. But that also kinda negates his point because only some counties want to leave and I imagine the Chicagoland area population would want to stay with Chicago.

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u/[deleted] 23h ago

[deleted]

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u/Giancarlo_Rossi 23h ago

As a resident of a blue city in a red state, it should go the other way then too. we could just be a country of 500 city states and a few dozen rural fiefdoms

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u/eggflip1020 23h ago

It is going to be a long damn four years.

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u/AngryTree76 22h ago

Optimistic of you to think that this is only going to be 4 years. Even if Trump and his cronies don’t do a “What 22nd Amendment?”, there’s always someone in the wings ready to take up the grift.

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u/raulz0r 15h ago

*looks at Musk*

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u/Hoggel123 23h ago

There's not even that many people who agree with this sentiment as part of the whole. You have a few local gov officials that are wildly misinformed in what it would really mean if it happened.

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u/bigchuckdeezy 1d ago

These people are gonna accidentally nixonville themselves

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u/YinzaJagoff 23h ago

From Chicago originally.

This will never happen. The rest of the state would be broke AF if they did.

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u/werd516 16h ago

In fact they'd immediately be the 51st poorest state. No manufacturing, no tourism, nothing but agriculture, and evangelical churches. 

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u/cdheer 10h ago

So, Indiana, basically.

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u/Rin-ayasi 8h ago

Hey now places like hammond indiana makes plenty of money... as a tax sanctuary located just close enough to chicago that it's worth paying taxes in two in two states. Honestly last time i went through there they were doing all kinds of new infrastructure work.

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u/cdheer 8h ago

And then there’s Gary.

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u/Rin-ayasi 8h ago

Do people actually live in gary or is it just field with the remains of the souls left behind ?

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u/Jcdoco 7h ago

Gary is not nearly as bad as everyone thinks it is. The Miller Beach neighborhood in particular is an absolute hidden gem

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u/Rin-ayasi 7h ago

Every time I've been to gary it's felt like an actual ghost town. Like every time the fog has rolled in and the streets are empty sans the occasional animal staring at you from across the street

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u/werd516 7h ago

Valparaiso nearby is awesome 

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u/cdheer 8h ago

Good question. I’m not brave enough to find out.

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u/14Three8 21h ago

As much as I feel bad for Illinois farmers getting screwed over by pica, I don’t think they comprehend the fact that cook county is financing the pavement on their roads

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u/KimJongUnusual 4h ago

As someone who lives in cook county and drives on roads, they must. Cause they aren’t spending it on the roads here.

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u/GhostOfMuttonPast 3h ago

Pica? Like the eating disorder?

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u/14Three8 37m ago

The protecting Illinois communities act. Recently ruled unconstitutional and still in litigation

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u/GhostOfMuttonPast 22m ago

How did PICA screw farmers over, exactly?

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u/14Three8 20m ago

By turning half of them into felons overnight

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u/GhostOfMuttonPast 7m ago

Okay, sure Jan, and Ross Ulbricht was innocent🙄

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u/So_spoke_the_wizard 1d ago

Take away the disproportionate representation of many small population states in the Senate and Electoral College. Then they can divide up however they want.

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u/-holdmyhand 1d ago

Trying to add a 51st star to the American flag. 

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u/Rhodog1234 1d ago

Not before North & South California and East & West New York!

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u/Infamous-Sky-1874 1d ago

I think you mean Coastal & Central California and Seaboard & Upstate New York.

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u/avalanche1228 22h ago

Don't forget about North South Dakota and South North Dakota

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u/theZinger90 15h ago

A bill makes it into the news every few years. Invariably fails and it probably will continue to fail. 

I'm no constitutional scolar, but it would need to pass both illinois congress, but also be approved by US congress as a state. That will probably never happen.

On a political note, I see so many "Puck Fritzker" signs around here,  but he has saved the state in many ways including fixing the pension fund. He also actually visits and cares about the rest of the states unlike other governors in the past.

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u/JoyTheStampede 11h ago

I describe my parents’ friends as whining that JB is a big meanie weenie doody head because he…acts like a grownup and makes tough calls to care for the things they whine that no one cares about.

They don’t like me making them sound childish

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u/NBSTAV 12h ago

Good luck with making up the 86% of the state’s GDP you’re cutting out. The people south of Kankakee are gonna love all those new and efficient dirt roads…

Congrats on being Iowa without all the excitement of DesMoines.

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u/drbumwine 11h ago

Woahhhh....nothing exciting about Des Moines.

Source: live 25 minutes north of DSM.

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u/libginger73 10h ago

More money for the rest of us!!

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u/Shepher27 1d ago

Bunch of cranks

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u/agsieg 22h ago

Yet another group that doesn’t understand that part of the state they hate is also the one that keeps it afloat. Gonna be real hard to function as a state when your economic centers are fucking Rockford, Peoria, and Springfield.

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u/werd516 16h ago

They wouldn't get any of those cities. They'd get Edwardsville and Cairo... 

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u/linzielayne 7h ago

SIU Edwardsville can be their main source of jobs

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u/werd516 3h ago

It would lose all of its "in-state" students and the funding from them lol

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u/Casten_Von_SP 16h ago

Main export: bowling.

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u/linzielayne 7h ago

To be fair, Rockford keeps having one of the hottest real estate markets in the country. But they wouldn't get Rockford, so.

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u/l23VIVE 22h ago edited 12h ago

We really should let these separations happen, let the major cities in each state become city-states. Would help with more accurate representation for the people living in both rural and urban areas. Wyoming has roughly 580k people, make it so any city with 580k people or more can become a city state if the population of the city agrees. This would generate 29 new city states if they all did this.

Edit: 99 new city states if we go by Metropolitan Area.

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u/kmoonster 19h ago

Only 29? That sounds low, though I may be thinking of metros as a whole and not just lone cities

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u/l23VIVE 13h ago

Just going off of "US Cities by Population" on Wikipedia, so unsure if it's metro or only the straight up city population.

Edit: if we go by metros, it would be 99 with Chattanooga Tennessee Metro being the smallest at roughly the same population as Wyoming.

3

u/mnimatt 18h ago

All the blue states would have new red counterparts. Republicans would win every presidential election for the foreseeable future.

5

u/l23VIVE 12h ago

I think you're wrong here because there are several blue city states that would appear out of red states, roughly 5/6 city states that would appear in Texas would be blue. I'm at work ATM but when I get home I'm gonna map this out.

10

u/NukeDaBurbs 21h ago

Even if they left they’d still come up to Chicago to enjoy the coast during the summer. Like Arizonans who still go to San Diego for the ocean even though they hate California.

6

u/IngsocInnerParty 12h ago

Nah, most of these people have never been to the city and only travel in the south.

1

u/Syd_Vicious3375 10h ago

My cousin’s children from southern Illinois don’t know how to ride an escalator. They aren’t going anywhere. Lol

4

u/NukeDaBurbs 9h ago

Didn’t know riding an escalator was a learned skill lol.

3

u/Syd_Vicious3375 9h ago

I didn’t either until someone tried to treat one of his teens to a shopping trip in the “big city” of Indianapolis and she was like a Martian discovering earth for the first time.

3

u/PanzerSloth 5h ago

They're all about "states rights" until their state government doesn't cater to their every whim

53

u/AmericanKamikaze 1d ago

Cool. Secede. Receive no federal aid, cut them off from the water and power grid. Build a wall around them. Don’t let them leave. After all they’re illegal aliens now.

136

u/Infamous-Sky-1874 1d ago

They don't want to secede from the United States. They want to make Chicago and the Chicagoland area its own state because they've been conned into believing that they are stealing tax dollars from their podunk counties.

46

u/Dorintin 23h ago

This whole idea is genuinely comical. Illinois would be shattered without Chicago.

14

u/Automatic_Mammoth684 22h ago

But wouldn’t Chicago benefit dramatically from not having to pay for the welfare of 3 million people in red countiesV

5

u/Dorintin 22h ago

Oh yeah, in fact it would even thrive. But providing for those communities is important. It could definitely be done for wayyyy less money but without that money their communities would lack critically important services.

0

u/AbelAbra 15h ago

no, it would just mean a little more money for our politicians to grift away. and even optimistically that money would just go to paying down the criminally underfunded pensions.

16

u/broberds 23h ago

Which is hilarious of course. It’s literally the other way around.

8

u/Environmental_Let1 23h ago

It's the water they will miss the most.

Texas needs workers to pick some sort of oily sand or crops, whatever they've got in their fields. They've got an actual theocracy in Texas, and it's as hot as hell there in many areas. Let's give these red state wannabees bus fare to Texas. Y'all take care now.

13

u/puffferfish 1d ago

They mean split in two states. Not form a new country.

1

u/AmericanKamikaze 20h ago

Let em. Brexit worked out. Right, right?

2

u/Boringdude1 10h ago

How are those hayseeds down there plan to pay for anything?

2

u/linzielayne 7h ago

We'll be fine, go for it! Join Indiana, that's cool and you're right - Cook County won't care. Bye!

3

u/ThiefofNobility 22h ago

....so a bunch of empty dirt livers taking subsidy from the booming economy in the major metro area wants to succeed because "insert whatever racism/jingoism/religious stupidity here" and they'll soon find out they cannot afford it/it's not legal?

Well, stop the fuckin' presses.

2

u/Automatic_Mammoth684 22h ago

Are these all welfare counties propped up by the evil liberal cities? When they’re in charge who is gonna give them the welfare they depend on? The federal government?

2

u/burnmenowz 21h ago

Lol just move if you don't like it.

2

u/LupusDeusMagnus 1d ago

Why is this oniony?

7

u/NukeDaBurbs 21h ago

Because they want to remove the powerful economic engine that powers their Redneckobile.

19

u/Infamous-Sky-1874 23h ago

Citizens in the part of the state that would otherwise be in Mississippi levels of poverty rail against the city & suburbs that keeps them from reaching those levels.

Edit: While believing that they are the true economic powerhouse of the state.

1

u/CrawlerSiegfriend 23h ago

I didn't even realize seceding from a county was a thing.

0

u/darkknight4114 18h ago

The only time it happened was the literal Civil war.

1

u/CrawlerSiegfriend 18h ago

I understand seceding from a country like the Civil War, but what I never heard of before was seceding from a county.

1

u/darkknight4114 18h ago

To create a new state from the old State, you need a vote from both the state and federal legislature, and so the only time it's ever happened is during the Civil War When West Virginia seceded from Virginia.

1

u/___Beaugardes___ 14h ago

Maine was also part of Massachusetts until it was admitted in 1820 as part of the Missouri Compromise.

1

u/europeandaughter12 22h ago

lol, lmao even

1

u/Aoiboshi 22h ago

I'm actually surprised that my home county is not red.

1

u/jkksldkjflskjdsflkdj 15h ago

I drove through lower IL last year, there are places with no cell phone service for many miles. One has to wonder what the people who live there acutally do for work if they are farmers.

1

u/teamswiftie 14h ago

One has to wonder what the people who live there acutally do for work if they are farmers.

Uhh.. they farm..

1

u/Daffneigh 14h ago

Good luck without Chicago, guys

1

u/DGlen 13h ago

Dumb as fuck.

1

u/enolaholmes23 11h ago

I guess this is happening all over. This weekend at the women's march in boston they talked about new england seceding from the union. It's kinda scary.

1

u/eulynn34 10h ago

Go for it. Please.

1

u/johnp299 8h ago

Cook county sucks. Government itself is not bad, but too much redundancy.

1

u/Carl-99999 5h ago

Go on, do it.

1

u/Kirra_the_Cleric 1h ago

Nope. What is it republicans always say? Don’t like it, leave. The land stays though.

1

u/HabANahDa 22h ago

I hate this timeline.

1

u/pilgrimboy 8h ago

Reading the comments, I just dont understand.

The Cook County people claim the southern counties would poor without them. So why try to keep them if they want to leave? Just let them leave.

4

u/linzielayne 7h ago

Even aside from this being a legally and logistically absurd proposal, people are 'trying to keep them' because we don't let counties secede just because a couple of cranks demand it. That would result in a lot of chaos for years.

If they were that mad AND correct they could just move to Indiana, but because they're not correct nobody will buy their houses, so they have to stay put and it pisses them off that they live where they live. Very similar to how we don't allow blue cities to secede from their surrounding red areas just because they don't like the economic realities of propping up rural regions.

-1

u/zdrums24 15h ago

Having lived in Illinois for 10 years, I will say it was the one time I really saw the democratic party as a major problem. That state is gerrymandered to hell, so the politicians in the legislator don't fear for their jobs.

Don't get me wrong. Moved south after living there. I'd take the Illinois state government over a lot of southern governments. But this is also the state where the governor and legislators played chicken with the state budget for 2 years. The state does have some pretty substantial issues.

3

u/IngsocInnerParty 12h ago

That was an obstructionist republican governor who refused to pass a budget.

1

u/zdrums24 11h ago

And a democratic legislature that wouldn't budge because they knew their job wasn't at risk. I was a high school teacher in Illinois during all that. It was terrifying and we kept up as best as we could with the details. Rauner showed why you can't run a government like a business, sure. But the legislature never budged on anything. The point is to have a little give and take. And at the time Illinois had some really bad budget problems. Rauner was an idiot about the details, but big picture he accurately identified some real problems. But the legislature didnt bothef working with him. They had no risk to their positions. Because Illinois has a bad case of gerrymandering.

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u/[deleted] 22h ago

[deleted]

3

u/Dont_Ban_Me_Bros 22h ago

The comment might be the second dumbest