SPOILER: THEY’RE FLEEING. The only options for Illinois millennials: fight or flight.

Dowling calls for Illinois millennials to get engaged. Kudos to him for the wake up call.

But the question of what exactly Dowling wants millennials to fight for remains. He doesn’t make clear whether he favors passing the tough reforms like a constitutional amendment so the state can restructure not-yet-earned pension benefits, or just more tax schemes and the pension “fixes” Pritzker is considering. (More on Pritzker’s progressive tax scheme and his potential pension fixes here, here and here.)

If Dowling favors more taxes and “fixes”, he’ll need to revisit his opinion piece – especially the line where he says, “We are the ones that will shoulder the $129 billion for the foreseeable future.” Dowling wrongly assumes Illinois millennials will stick around to pay the higher tax bills and face the cuts in services. But millennials are highly educated and an extremely tech-savvy generation. They don’t have to stay in Illinois to find their future.

The data already tells us they aren’t.

Illinois has lost a net of 107,000 millennials and their dependents to other states across the nation since 2012, according to the Internal Revenue Service.

It’s a stunning number.

Yes, but hardly shocking. Illinois has probably already entered a fiscal death spiral, and the state will go broke in the two ways made famous by Ernest Hemingway.