The potential good news for Connecticut in this recessionary depression, or this depressing recession, is that fewer people have the itch to move away to places that are warm and happy, with low taxes and cockfights and wine in grocery stores and inexpensive health insurance that doesn’t mandate coverage of faith healing and leeches sucking out the bad blood.
The trend is particularly pronounced in Connecticut, where a recent University of Connecticut study found that the population is growing so old, they’ve forgotten where it was that they wanted to move. The UConn study reported that the state has about the ninth-highest percentage of population in the country aged 65 or over.
This suggests that while the National Wheelchair and Walker Convention in Hartford will be well attended, the restaurants and bars and strip clubs at the Front Street development will be empty when the folks all drive home in their Buick Park Avenues to drink warm milk and watch public television.
While sedentary and drooling might not seem like much of an economic development plan, Connecticut does benefit from the nationwide trend to stay put — unlike decades past, when the state’s most productive workers ran from the state screaming, “They want to tax the millionaires; they want to tax the millionaires.” The nation’s relocation rate is the lowest it has been since 1948, as people recognize that either they can’t sell their homes, or the job to which they aspire may disappear before they get to the Promised Land.
New U.S. Census Bureau data also indicates that suburbs are continuing to grow and the cities are continuing to shrink. The continued subsidy and angst on behalf of make-believe “downtowns” appears more and more futile, as folks exercise their liberty.
The mobility in the United States (twice as high as it is in Europe) is a triumph of the American instinct to move on in an effort to move up. That explains in part the state’s exodus of younger folks — a population that recognizes that the state government commitment to the care and feeding of public-sector employees is a long-term burden best avoided by moving elsewhere.
As early as the late 1980s, Connecticut was showing a net loss of more than 20,000 persons per year, as the General Assembly made clear that tax-and-spend, combined with hostile indifference to business, would be the philosophy in place for those who stayed.
Interestingly enough, some of the basket-case, awful places to call home manage to engender the most loyalty to its native sons and daughters. Louisiana and Michigan, for instance, have native populations of more than 80 percent, according to Newgeography.com. That either means not many people are escaping, or newcomers are not inclined to move there.
A study last year by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University reported that one-third of the state’s residents were born elsewhere. The state’s young and restless escaped, and the Massachusetts newcomers must have gotten lost on the way to New Hampshire, where taxes are low and liquor is cheap.
If it weren’t for immigrants, the state’s population would be going down at levels similar to last-place Rhode Island, where you can drive across in 30 minutes looking for factory jobs that the state chased out.
There’s no mystery to it. As former state Rep. Robert Ward, the House minority leader, wrote in a 1995 essay: “For most of the past 40 years, Connecticut has been controlled by politicians and bureaucrats who seem to view employers with suspicion.”
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
