From the Boston Globe - “Census estimate a concern for state – Seats in Congress, US funding at risk”:
Massachusetts lost residents for the second year in a row, new federal Census estimates show, underscoring an accelerating population shift from the Northeast to the South and West that threatens to erode the state's political and economic clout.The article specifically cites the exodus of young professionals to warmer states with lower living costs. I very much doubt that Massachusetts will take the necessary steps to keep that demographic in place here in the Bay State.
5 comments:
I agree, it is all about the weather.
Like whether the state will be confiscating your guns a year down the road.
Or whether you'll end up paying for illegal aliens to go to college.
Or whether you'll continue subsidizing car insurance for bad drivers.
Or whether you'll have to pay an extra tax for the honor and privilege of driving through a construction clogged downtown area to get a bit to eat.
Or whether your tax dollars will continue to be used to buy cigarettes, scratch tickets, and sneakers for welfare layabouts.
Or whether your legislators will EVER give a damn what you, as a tax-paying, law-abiding citzen, want from them.
Mass doesn't care about people leaving for the South. Those are usually Republicans. They just want enough illegals and welfare-collecting scum to keep Democrats in office.
Boston has been losing population since a peak of 707k in 1940 for a loss or 116k or 16%. This is fairly typical of Northeastern cities during this time period. Detroit has suffered an even more dramatic loss of population. Its peak was also in 1940 of 1670k while its present population is almost half that at 900k. Any short term solutions, urban renewal, new political groupings etc., will be temporary at best and counterproductive at worst. These cities haven't stopped their decline over the last 60 years so I'm pretty sure that they won't stop it now. Eventually these cities will find that they exist simply to serve as jobs programs for public employees and not much else.
All this growling about welfare fraud and broken borders and the planned-for-2006 revoking of the Second Amendment almost makes us lose sight of the huge, huge story here: this tenth of 1 percent drop in population. What an exodus!
"You're right, Mr. Thatcher. I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I'll have to close this place... in sixty years."
Massachusetts is down 0.1%, as is New York. Rhode Island was down 0.3%, and Washington D.C. was down 0.7%. For whatever reasons, Connecticut and Vermont are both up 0.3%, and New Hampshire's at +0.8%, so many of Massachusetts' former citizens may not have taken cross-continental flight.
47 of 50 states are up, though only 18 saw increases of 1%. The big gainers were Arizona (+3.5%), Nevada (+3.5%), Idaho (+2.4%), Florida (+2.3%), and Utah (+2.0%). In Nevada, Idaho, and Utah's cases, the lower population base had a bit to do with those larger percentages. The nation as a whole was up 0.9%.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/22/AR2005122200268_pf.html
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