Why Texas Is Growing (and Illinois Isn’t)

nat review ^ | 1/17/14 | m barone

[bestintxas]

The Census Bureau’s holiday treat is its release of annual state-population estimates, to be digested slowly in the new year.

The headline from this year’s release is that population growth from July 2012 to July 2013 was 0.72 percent, lower than in the two preceding years and the lowest since the Great Depression 1930s. This reflects continuing low, below-replacement-rate birth rates and lower immigration than in 1982–2007. Net immigration from Mexico evidently continues to be zero.

The nation’s economy may be growing again, but Americans — and potential Americans — are not acting like it. There’s a parallel here with poll results showing that majorities still believe we are in a recession that the National Bureau of Economic Research says ended in June 2009, nearly five years ago.

Sluggish population growth is matched by sluggish geographic mobility. The Census Bureau reports that only 4.8 million Americans moved across state lines in 2012 — about half the percentage that did so in the boom years of the 1990s. Americans were similarly immobile, indeed even more so, in the 1930s (the Okies fleeing the Dust Bowl for California were a picturesque but demographically minor exception).

Numbers can seem cold and impersonal, but beneath these numbers is a picture of a pessimistic, risk-averse people. But not uniformly, and not everywhere. Population growth has been accelerating in states that depend heavily on the private sector and declining in states with relatively high dependence on government.

[nascarnation]

I certainly hope you are correct. Originally I figured she would be a great sinkhole for millions of progressive dollars that wouldn’t go where they could actually influence the race.