Many downstate Illinois residents dislike Chicago’s strong influence in the state. Last year, a total of 33 counties voted to secede from Illinois and form their own state. Earlier this month, Indiana House Speaker Todd Huston invited those counties to join Indiana. He even created a commission to study the possibility.

That’s first-rate trolling, but I thought it’d be fun to think through the prospect of Indiana picking up these 33 counties. The “secessionist” counties in Illinois are in the southern part of the state, with many bordering Indiana. This one-third of counties comprise only 6.6% of the Illinois population and only 4% of the state’s economy.

Per capita income in the secessionist counties is $54,381. If it were a separate state, it would be the second poorest state in the union, between Mississippi and West Virginia. The remaining counties in Illinois enjoy per capita income of $73,228.

Adding the secessionist counties to Indiana would cut our per capita income enough for us to slide from 14th to 11th place from the bottom. Only 18.6% of adults in these counties have completed college, while the Illinois total is 36.7%. This new “secessionist” state would be the least well-educated state and would be right about where the nation as a whole was in the late 1980s.

Economic growth in the secessionist counties has been at about half the rate of the rest of Illinois so far this century. And, while the rest of Illinois has experienced very modest population growth of about 1.4%, these secessionist counties have lost a whopping 5.2% of their population.

So it’s pretty easy to see why these counties might be unhappy about their economic conditions. They are truly dismal.

But how much of this is plausibly the fault of Illinois state government? After all, the other Illinois counties are doing much better. That includes Chicago, where the economy continues to be robust, even as population growth has stalled. Is it possible that these counties are somehow being robbed of economic opportunity by Illinois?

Nope. As it turns out, these counties are essentially welfare queens of the state of Illinois.

A pair of researchers at Southern Illinois University’s Paul Simon Public Policy Institute publish reports every couple years on the flow of public budgets across Illinois. As it turns out, residents in these secessionist counties pay about $2,986 per person each year in state taxes. That would make them the fourth lowest-taxed residents in the nation. But here’s the rub: They receive $5,430 per person each year in support from residents of the other 69 Illinois counties.

In contrast, the rest of the state collects $4,485 in state taxes each year and gets back $4,217 per person each year in state spending. So, each resident of the secessionist counties gets $2,444 more state dollars spent in their county each year than they pay in taxes. On top of that, they pay only 66.6 cents for every dollar of taxes residents in the other 69 Illinois counties pay.

It is hard to pinpoint just what these Illinois secessionist counties are angry about. Most likely it is bad vibes borne of ignorance.

If they did come to Indiana, Hoosier taxpayers would need to pony up almost $2 billion more per year to match the fiscal largesse those secessionist counties receive from the rest of Illinois. It is worth noting that those taxes would come primarily from urban areas, like Fishers, Carmel and Indianapolis.

So no, we don’t really want them – though it is easy to see why Illinois might not want them either.

So far this century, a whopping half of all the population growth has occurred in just 75 out of 3,143 U.S. counties, or 2.3%. Fully 45% of U.S. counties have lost population this century.

This deep economic divergence has gripped the United States for four decades. It is not between Red or Blue states, or places with high taxes or woke policies. It is primarily between urban and non-urban counties, and reflects the desire of most Americans to live in places with strong local public services – great schools, low crime and businesses that offer a mix of goods and services. Places that offer these do well, those that do not will look more and more like rural Illinois.

Michael J. Hicks is the director of the Center for Business and Economic Research and an associate professor of economics in the Miller College of Business at Ball State University.