Don't worry about lost income from the rich leaving, we're supposed to believe. It's just poorer folks fleeing.

It's simply not true. There's recent, hard data directly refuting that claim. If you want the best evidence, the Internal Revenue Service released its latest state-to-state migration numbers last month. Wirepoints analyzed the number of people moving into and out of Illinois and their net impact by income groups.

The data show that while lower income groups are fleeing Illinois in somewhat larger numbers, bigger earners are leaving, too. And they're the ones that account for the overwhelming share of wealth lost by the state.

Specifically, tax filers with income over $200,000 made up 11% of all filers who fled, and they accounted for over half of the income that left Illinois.

Here are the details:

The IRS breaks down tax filers by Adjusted Gross Income ("AGI") when it reports interstate migration data. Its new release covered the most recent year available, 2018.

First, let's look at the net number of tax filers leaving Illinois in each income group. As you can see, the largest group is filers with under $25,000 in income. A net of over 9,900 filers were lost. But they were hardly alone. The wealthiest bracket of $200,000 and above, which is a vastly smaller portion of Illinois' population, lost nearly half that, 4,800.