ABOUT THE ILLINOIS EXODUS

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s $3 trillion spending bill is best understood not as a bailout, but a bail-in. It would be a nationalization of the progressive blue-state model of unconstrained spending.

For the past several decades, that model has had two main components, neither of which their state tax bases can support: pension and health benefits negotiated with public-sector unions and a welfare state, principally Medicaid, which by the third law of Democratic thermodynamics can expand to infinity.

Someone’s gotta pay for it, and that someone under the Pelosi plan may soon be the rest of the nation’s taxpayers who don’t live in California, New York, New Jersey or Illinois and who have never voted to take on this unsustainable fiscal burden.

Residents of all four states have been fleeing for years. The reigning theory of Democratic governance regards the loss of productive private capacity as irrelevant to their goals. …

Pelosi’s $3 trillion spendathon is a down payment on ensuring that this profligacy is paid for permanently by everyone.

Joe Biden has “transformed” himself into a younger version of Bernie Sanders and adopted the pretense that the taxes people send Washington are now just Monopoly money.

Daniel Henninger, The Wall Street Journal