Where even the Walmarts are closing
Washington Examiner
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It feels like eons ago, but there was a time when liberals would shriek if a new Walmart planned to come to their area. Now, ironically, they are shrieking because the Walmarts are leaving.
Store closings are not necessarily rare; we found 160 in the past couple of years. A retailer with 5,000 stores across the nation has to be flexible and go where the business is. But there is a revealing pattern. In the suburbs of Chicago, three underperforming stores will close almost simultaneously. The company declined to give specifics to local media, but this is a reminder of the Chicago area’s decadelong decline. Its population and tax base have been shrinking for nine straight years. Crime has soared, too, in part because the area is close to adopting universal no-cash bail and making it impossible for police to enforce the law against thieves. Businesses don’t like that.
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Census estimates show that Illinois lost 300,000 net residents over the past nine years, almost the equivalent of the population of Orlando, Florida, which has probably been one of the more popular destinations for those fleeing.
Liberals face a reckoning for what Walter Russell Mead dubbed their “blue-state model,” by which he meant jurisdictions dominated by public employee unions and their left-wing allies in government. Blue-state model policies are prompting economic refugees to get out of practically every Democratic state, leaving fiscal calamity behind. Once-dynamic states, cities, and towns are dwindling as they shed residents and tax revenues.
People don’t pick up and move to the place with the lowest possible marginal tax rate. They are affected by the unaffordability and poor quality of housing, needless COVID restrictions that Democrats tend to impose, rising crime, schools that don’t educate, sclerotic unionized bureaucracies delivering crumbling services, and excessive taxation even of people on low incomes. California taxes income of $60,000 at a higher rate than most states tax millionaires. In Illinois, especially, there is rampant government corruption and $313 billion unfunded liability to pay public sector pensions.
Chicago, San Francisco, New York, and similarly mismanaged cities “coasted,” as the Atlantic put it, “for decades on the knowledge that firms and workers were being pulled inexorably toward their downtowns.” But then, left-wing Democrats’ hypocritical rule-by-COVID-panic convinced many businesses that it wasn’t worth paying for large downtown offices as workers shifted to remote or hybrid-remote work. Various reports reveal that companies are cutting their downtown office space and letting leases expire. Commercial real estate prices in Manhattan have fallen more than 7% in a year, yet half the available space stands empty.
Cities in blue states where Democrats have a lock on government unreasonably limit personal freedom and business operations while letting criminals run free and allowing parks to become drug trade encampments. Public schools, meanwhile, remain as terrible as they ever were, or worse. Is it any wonder that the middle class should become fed up and move away to Texas, Idaho, or Florida?