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2

Aging Population No Excuse for RI

Putting aside whether we should care about the size of our labor force, it isn’t true that Rhode Island’s has been disproportionately affected by the aging population.

4

Census Numbers and Replacement Rhode Islanders

New U.S. Census estimates of states’ populations are out, and Rhode Island just like last year, experienced a small increase in population.  And once again the details of the numbers give reason for concern.

For the second year in a row, total population increased by a smaller number.  That is, 2014’s increase was 1,447, 2015’s was 1,127, and 2016’s is 819.  The natural population increase resulting from having more births than deaths was the smallest since 2010.

Of more concern, though, is that more Rhode Islanders continue to leave for other states than to head in the other direction, but those departures are over-compensated with immigration from other countries.  This year, we lost 3,784 Rhode Islanders to other states but gained 4,203 from other countries.  (Illegal immigrants would be included in these numbers.)  According to the Census, Rhode Island lost 28,565 residents to other states but imported 25,406 residents from other countries.

RI-compofpopchange-2010-2016b

Putting aside the fact that people who arrived from other countries may have later left for other states, Rhode Island has, roughly speaking, swapped out 2.4% of its population for people from other countries.  One needn’t be xenophobic to worry that this trend might not be ideal.

As the Rhode Island Family Prosperity Index report suggests, the Ocean State’s policy decisions are pushing our neighbors to leave.  Meanwhile, the government plantation model of the state’s major industry (government) creates incentive for elected officials and bureaucrats to seek to import clients who’ll require their services (and provide them votes).

5

Electing Themselves a New Population

Ted Nesi beat me to an initial review of the latest Census estimates showing what changed in states’ populations in 2015, compared with 2014:

Net migration to Rhode Island was slightly positive in 2015, as the net arrival of 4,727 international migrants was nearly offset by the net departure of 4,693 domestic residents. There were also 10,984 births and 9,533 deaths in the state during the 12 months ended July 1.

Focus in on those migrant numbers.  What that means is that more people who were in Rhode Island last year left for other states than people in other states chose to take up residence in Rhode Island.  When it comes to crossing national borders to and from Rhode Island, the picture is almost exactly the reverse.  This is nothing new, although the disparity increased this year.  Here are the last five years of data as a percentage of the prior year’s population:

ri-popchange-domandintmigration-2011-2015

 

Every year for the past five, Rhode Island has displaced nearly a half-percent of its resident population with people from other countries.  That means the total differential is close to a full percent of the population, adding up to five percent in the above chart.  Think of it in terms of voters:  If everybody in the blue columns could have been expected to vote in a certain way on a particular ballot question and everybody in the red columns votes the other way, each vote counts once but changing or replacing a vote creates a two-vote change.

One begins to see why folks in state government — whatever they may say when the microphones are on — have done precious little to repair the many flaws that leave Rhode Island not competitive with pretty much any state in the nation.  Independent-minded Rhode Islanders may leave the state, but officials can opt for policies that replace them with others more likely to require government services.  As long as officials can rig the political system to collect money from taxpayers and the federal government, increasing their number of clients remains more important than increasing payers.

In the long run — or even the not-so-long run — the strategy is doomed, but at some point it becomes locked in, because too much of the population has been displaced for it to become plausible that voters will reverse course.  Rhode Island may have passed that point already.

6

RI Population: Starting Saturday on a Worrying Note

Over my habitual Saturday morning coffee and pancakes, I perused Ted Nesi’s weekly column and came across this intriguing item:

Moody’s latest Rhode Island economic outlook, presented this week at the twice-annual revenue conference, is a mixed bag. … Other pluses: the job market and personal income both appear to be improving, and net migration (residents moving in versus moving out) turned positive in 2014 for the first time in a decade.

The downsides are middle-income jobs and home sales (and I continue to believe the overall employment numbers are greatly overstated).  But what about that net migration?  Slide 23 of the Moody’s presentation does indeed show positive migration, although it isn’t clear what scale the numbers are on or why they don’t match up with numbers directly from the U.S. Census.

Population is a limited measure, though.  A more critical question, for a struggling state, is: Who is coming and who is going?  Unfortunately, the IRS taxpayer migration data for 2014 isn’t online, for the moment, and detailed state-level data from the Census isn’t out for that year, yet.  Still, the Census does have the population estimates broken out by “components of change,” with some high-level detail about why people came and went.

From 2013 to 2014, the Census estimates that 1,375 more children were born in the state than people died, but that’s not the detail we’re interested in.  Under “net migration,” the data does show 903 more people coming here from elsewhere than the reverse, but the “where” is important.  When it comes to domestic migration — that is, people moving from one state to another — Rhode Island lost 3,387 residents.  International migration that makes up the difference, with 4,290 more people coming to Rhode Island from other countries than emigrating.

Obviously, the world is full of varied people, so any assumptions made at this level are just that: assumptions.  Still, recalling my observation, in August, that the increase of students in Providence schools came almost entirely from Hispanics who need extra help with English, the picture comes into focus pretty well.  The Census’s FactFinder tool can fill in some of the details.  From 2009 to 2013 — over the course of just four years — the percentage of children living in households receiving cash assistance increased by more than 50%.

RI-childrenpoverty-2009-2013

To deepen the picture a little, consider that the percentage of all families receiving public assistance increased by just 17%.  That’s still a big increase, but it suggests that Rhode Island’s population growth is in large part attributable to migration of poor, young families from countries to the south of the United States.

One needn’t be xenophobic to worry about the consequences of this demographic shift on the well-being of Rhode Islanders overall.  If Rhode Island’s economy were healthy and was therefore able to accommodate foreign families and empower them to lift themselves up, that would be wonderful.  More likely, though, like Lawrence, MA, we’ll continue to see government bring in new clients to turn RI into a company state, and somebody’s got to pay the bill.

8

Did RI Illicitly Gain Its Second US Congressional Seat?

EDITOR’S NOTE: It was publicly admitted by the United States Department of Commerce, under the direction of former Governor Gina Raimondo, that under its auspices, the 2020 US Census miscalculations wrongly apportioned to the state of Rhode Island an extra, undeserved seat in the US House of Representatives.  But was their more at play than […]

9

This Is the Poorest City in Rhode Island

Among the six places in Rhode Island with available data and populations of at least 25,000, Woonsocket ranks as the poorest. The typical Woonsocket household earns $44,310 a year, compared to the statewide median household income of $70,305.

10

With States Hands-Off, Homeschooling Takes Off

This article if from RealClearWire.com: https://realclearwire.com/articles/2022/11/02/as_states_let_home_schools_be_growing_numbers_are_just_fine_with_that_862241.html By Vince Bielski November 02, 2022 South Dakota epitomizes the rapid growth of homeschooling in America. Guided by the principle that parents, not the government, have the right to determine what and how their kids are taught, homeschooling families have overturned existing rules and batted down attempts over the […]

11

This Is the City With the Most Gun Stores in Rhode Island

here are over 393 million guns in circulation in the U.S., according to estimates from the Small Arms Survey, far outnumbering the national population of 327 million. In the United States – the only country in the world home to more civilian-owned guns than people – guns are big business.

13

Here’s How Rich Rhode Island Residents Are Compared to the Nation

The United States is in a period of historic inflation. The consumer price index rose by 8.5% over the 12 months ending in March 2022, the fastest increase in over four decades. Though it is not keeping pace with inflation, income is also on the rise in the United States.In Rhode Island, per capita income stands at $64,156, slightly lower than the national figure and the 18th highest among states.

14

How Much Food Costs in Rhode Island, Compared to the Nation

Inflation is surging in the United States – in large part because of rising food prices. In cities across the country, food today is 8% more expensive on average than it was a year ago, and American families are feeling the pinch. According to the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank, a family of four – two adults and two children – can expect to pay an estimated $9,835 on food in 2022.

15

Why Covid-19 and Influenza Vaccine Mandates For Rhode Island Health Care Workers Defy Evidence-Based Medicine

Dating back to the seminal 1954 polio vaccine trial involving 1.8 million U.S. children [1], randomized, controlled trials have generated the gold-standard evidence for making public health recommendations [2,3]. I repeat “recommendations,” not “mandates.” There are no data from four decades of influenza vaccine randomized, controlled trials, and < 2-years of covid-19 vaccine randomized, controlled trials, […]

18

The Difficult Math of COVID Death

Contrasting Roger Kimball’s calm erudition with the hysterics demanding “how many people do you want to die” points to a need for us to be able to consider difficult questions in public.

22

Rhode Island’s Political Leaders Are Failing on Their Promise to Help Average Families

At $888 per year for each of Rhode Island’s 1 million residents, a family of four is paying over $3,500 annually for excessive compensation deals for government workers, while the basic needs of their own families are being ignored by politicians.

With almost two-thirds of these excessive costs being heaped upon municipal taxpayers, the report further estimates that property taxes could be reduced by 25% if more reasonable, market-based collective bargaining agreements were negotiated.

23

Unfairness in RI Government’s Priorities

Mike Stenhouse’s recent op-ed in the Providence Journal puts the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity’s Public Union Excesses report in a broader context:

Beyond these extreme financial costs, an even more corrosive impact from this political cronyism is at play. People have lost trust in their government and are fed up with betrayals from lawmakers who have forgotten them, who cater only to special-interest concerns. Lawmakers make it ever-harder for people to take care of their families and reside in Rhode Island.

For these reasons, Rhode Island is not keeping pace with the rest of the nation when it comes to jobs and population growth. After 10 years of perhaps the slowest economic recovery among all states, Rhode Island’s political leaders are failing on their promises to help the average family.

Instead, by heaping more privileges upon those who help get them elected, politicians continue to lose the trust of the people, who are also losing hope for their state. These tragic circumstances have conspired to make it a virtual certainty that the Ocean State will lose a prized U.S. congressional seat after the 2020 national census because of its stagnant population growth.

Rhode Island strangles its families and businesses with taxes and regulations, but often, the sheer unfairness of the system can be the real poison.  As a member of the Tiverton Town Council, yesterday I participated in a “business walk” hosted by the Newport County Chamber of Commerce, which involved stopping in to talk with some business owners around town.

Of course, we heard about the problem of taxes, but the subjects that really animated business owners would better be classified as injustice.  The cost of government labor was seen not only as a cause of high taxes, but also as a budget imbalance preventing infrastructure improvement.  Similarly, the capriciousness of enforcement, with the rules not seeming to apply fairly to every business and changing depending on which government inspector paid a visit, is irksome beyond the cost.

Even after figuring out how to overcome all the regulatory obstacles that the state throws in their way and even after building high taxes, regulation-driven energy costs, and government bungled healthcare expenses into their business models, they still never know when an inspector will find some new rule to enforce or the legislature will come up with some new fee or obstacle to impose.

24

When Will State Government Stop Hoping?

A letter to the editor from Rhode Islander Kris Gregory appearing this week in the Wall Street Journal is another item of which state officials should take note, but probably won’t (emphasis added):

Bad legislation, as much as stealth taxes, also contributes to the state’s deteriorating business climate. Seven of 10 members of my small-business study group are moving their businesses to Massachusetts as a result of a seriously flawed paid-leave bill the governor signed last year over the opposition of the business community. Even former Rhode Island governor and 2016 presidential candidate Lincoln Chafee appears to be relocating to tax-friendly Wyoming. With the coming 2020 census, Rhode Island cannot afford the departures. The state is perilously close to losing the second of its two congressional seats, and with its relative population decline, getting less federal funding which supports more than a third of the state’s nearly $10 billion budget.

Rhode Island keeps squeezing its productive citizens because they are less concentrated than special interests.  But the thing about a group that tends to make decisions as individuals is that a critical mass will have decided to take an action that could be catastrophic before politicians are slapped with the reality.

In a sane state, the most recent jobs and employment report would be just such a slap.  Unfortunately, this is Rhode Island, where government officials seem to interpret the state’s motto, “Hope,” as a strategy.

25

The Strange Assertions of Abortion Advocates

One aspect of the abortion debate with which one really must contend is the deception of those who advocate for abortion as a right, starting with the idea that legislation to preserve women’s ability to kill their unborn children in the womb is about “reproductive health care.”  Reproductive of what?

So much of the pro-abortion argument requires distortion of the language and concepts that are involved.  Why that is should be obvious.  The other day, a progressive state senator from Providence, Gayle Goldin, and Providence Journal reporter Katnerine Gregg responded to news that a judge had struck down an Iowa law restricting abortion when the baby’s heartbeat can be detected, implying that it’s a concern because it may give the U.S. Supreme Court an opportunity to address the question of abortion.

Think of the underlying issue.

This law that is, at the moment, arguably unconstitutional essentially states that if an unborn child is so provably unique from the mother as to have his or her own heartbeat, a doctor can’t suck out his or her brain, tear him or her limb from limb, or otherwise kill the child (presumably except to save the life of the mother).  When that’s the fact of the act, the only way to maintain support has got to be to misdirect attention some other way.

Activists at the Rhode Island State House, the other day, emphasized minorities’ access to abortion, but starting from a different perspective paints a very different picture.  Something around 8% of Rhode Island’s population is black, but they account for some 16% of abortions.  Abortion kills black babies at about twice the rate that it kills white babies in the Ocean State.

A chart from the Guttmacher Institute shows that minorities, especially black non-Hispanics, have much higher abortion rates than white non-Hispanics, yet the claim of the chart is that “lack of access to health insurance and health care plays a role, as do racism and discrimination,” in abortion rates that vary by race.   Is Guttmacher, which is associated with Planned Parenthood, suggesting that racism leads to the higher rates, or is it suggesting that, but for racism and discrimination, the United States would have even higher rates for killing black babies.

That’s what the Providence activists would seem to be suggesting when they talk about “access.”  Pursuing policies that would keep a significant portion of a minority population alive is a strange kind of bigotry.

26

Waning Success, Waning Congressional Influence

Well, the good news, with Rhode Island’s looming loss of a Congressional seat, is that we can’t go any lower than the minimum:

Rhode Island last had a single seat in the House in the original Congress in 1789, when the number of seats was set directly by the U.S. Constitution. Since then, under a mandate in the Constitution, the number of House seats has been determined under a complex formula approved by Congress and based on state populations. Since the 1790 census, Rhode Island has always had two seats in the House, except for two decades in the early 20th century, when a booming immigrant population earned the state three seats.

The complex formula ranks potential House seats for each state. The top 385 are awarded seats in the House. That’s in addition to the minimum of one seat that every state is guaranteed by the Constitution.

I’ll admit that my thinking has changed a little on this over the years, at least to the extent of acknowledging some complications.  Yes, Rhode Island is set to lose a Congressional seat after the next census because our local society doesn’t offer the opportunity that it should for families to grow.

Our failures have mainly been an accelerant, however.  In the long run, we simply don’t have the space to keep up with other states’ expanding populations.  My changing perspective is the understanding that it isn’t irrational for Rhode Islanders to resist a NYC-tri-state-area level of population density.

Still, losing a Congressional seat because your successful state doesn’t have room to fit more people looks very different than our current case of losing it because the state isn’t successful.  We’d all be much wealthier in the former case and have disproportionate national influence for that reason.

27

War on Poverty Bolsters… Poverty

Here’s another data point for your “not what I was told to believe” file:

In Thursday’s Wall Street Journal, John Early and Phil Gramm share some depressing numbers about growing dependency in the United States:

During the 20 years before the War on Poverty was funded, the portion of the nation living in poverty had dropped to 14.7% from 32.1%. Since 1966, the first year with a significant increase in antipoverty spending, the poverty rate reported by the Census Bureau has been virtually unchanged…Transfers targeted to low-income families increased in real dollars from an average of $3,070 per person in 1965 to $34,093 in 2016…Transfers now constitute 84.2% of the disposable income of the poorest quintile of American households and 57.8% of the disposable income of lower-middle-income households. These payments also make up 27.5% of America’s total disposable income.

This massive expansion of redistribution has negatively impacted incentives to work.

Incentives aren’t only relevant to welfare recipients, but also to government and the politicians who populate it.  The progressive concept of scientific governance — setting experts to make the “right” decisions for everybody — requires that the people making decisions will make them honestly.  But when government begins giving things out, the incentive is to keep doing so whether it achieves the desired policy outcome or not, because at the end of the day, the desired outcome is votes.

More broadly, the incentive for the bureaucracy is to keep having things to do, like processing benefits, and to sell government as the solution for problems.  For all of these reasons, the incentive is to never honestly assess whether a War on Poverty has actually helped maintain poverty levels while causing a host of unexpected social ills.  Alternately, the incentive is to keep adjusting the definition of “poverty” so that the rate never changes even if the experience of the population does.

28

Maybe the U.S. Isn’t Doing So Badly

Noting that populists on the Left and the Right tend to emphasize an unequal distribution of economic growth over the last half-century or so, James Pethokoukis reminds us that we should have a healthy suspicion of the numbers that get us to that conclusion:

A University of Chicago poll of top economists found that 70 percent agreed with the proposition that the Census Bureau’s conclusion “substantially understates how much better off people in the median American household are now economically, compared with 35 years ago.” The economist Martin Feldstein, for instance, argues that the agency fails to take into account shrinking household size, the rise in government-benefit transfers, and changes in tax policy. It also measures inflation in a way many experts think overstates the actual rise in living costs.

Depending how many of the adjustments one is willing to make, incomes for the population at large and for broad income categories, as well, have gone up by multiples of the rate that we often hear.  Since the ’70s, middle-income families have seen an increase of 42%, and the lowest-income group has seen an increase of 70%.  To the extent the middle class is shrinking, writes Pethokoukis, it’s because they’re moving up.

Even that doesn’t account for economic mobility and, as Pethokoukis highlights, the real improvements in everybody’s lives:

The idea that most Americans are worse off than they were in the 1970s seems intuitively nonsensical to those of us who were living back then. As former Obama economic adviser Jason Furman once put it: “ignore the statistics for a second and use your common sense. Remember when even upper-middle-class families worried about staying on a long distance call for too long?

When I went to college, I created real financial hardship for myself calling a girlfriend back home, and I brought with me a 20-inch black-and-white TV that picked up a handful of stations and was connected to a junkie VHS player.  To be sure, the TV was kind of antiquated technology by that point, but not laughably so.

What would be the parallel for a similarly situated student these days?  Only a seven-inch generic Android tablet, maybe — connected to the campus’s free WiFi, and with a Netflix subscription, providing the student with unimaginable entertainment and information options?

29

The Flawed Thinking of a #10kPaysTheWay Policy

The RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity has found its Bad Bill of the Week in Pawtucket Democrat Representative Carlos Tobon’s legislation proposing to pay wealthy people $10,000 each to move to Rhode Island:

“If we have to pay families, students, and businesses to move to or remain in Rhode Island, to survive our state’s oppressive tax and regulatory climate, then something is very wrong,” said Mike Stenhouse, the Center’s CEO. “Worse than the obvious face-value inanity of the bill, the ignorant belief of how an economy and family dynamics actually work is what is most troubling. The legislation openly acknowledges the negative economy in our state, yet, as with other progressive policies, it tries to band-aid the symptom rather than cure the core illness. ”

The bill is so incandescently wrong-headed that it’s difficult to know where to begin criticizing it, but among the more objectionable aspects of Tobon’s proposal is the explicit concern of losing a seat in the House of Representatives in Washington, D.C.   That is what motivates politician’s to take action.  Decades of watching productive Rhode Islanders flow elsewhere for opportunity weren’t enough.  Political clout is the real concern.

As of the July Census projections of states’ populations, Rhode Island was just 157 people away from losing one of its congressmen.  That’s a 0.015% decrease in population, and we lose out.  The next state in line is New York, which is currently on track to lose a congressional seat.  But if the Empire State manages to add 0.015% to its population, then it will keep what it has at Rhode Island’s expense.

Numbers aside, suffice it to say that a state that has to bribe people in order to maintain its level of congressional representation — through either government welfare programs or direct hand-outs — is a state that has proven that it doesn’t deserve much clout in determining the course of the nation.

Rhode Islanders must get our own House in order.  If we could just  put into office people who don’t prioritize central planning and insider control, we could make our state a place that people aren’t as quick to leave and to which they want to move.

30

Maybe We Should Worry More About the Effects of Family-Climate Change

The other day, I posted a chart showing how net domestic migration loss — that is, the number of people leaving Rhode Island for other states beyond those who moved the other way — equated with a loss of the full populations of 11 towns.  RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity CEO Mike Stenhouse wanted another way to visualize the loss, and we came up with this:

census-migration-2004-2015-map-final2

We hear all sorts of fears about how climate change will affect the lives of Rhode Islanders at some unspecified point in the future.  Yet, clearly, the change in the state’s climate for business and for families is already having a detrimental effect.  Why do our elected leaders seem more concerned about speculative harm in the future than the observable change in our social landscape occurring right now?

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