Category: Demographics
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Attack the Demographic Underpinnings of Poverty
by James A. Bacon There is a case to be made for family planning and access to abortion services as a way to improve the lives of poor women. If you lean liberal in your politics, you’ll probably be comfortable with the arguments advanced by Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell (published yesterday morning in the Times-Dispatch).…
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Why Virginia Has No Renewable Energy
By Peter Galuszka For all the hew and cry over renewable energy sources and the “War on Coal,” it is extremely interesting to see just how much progress Virginia has made with renewable energy. The answer: hardly any to none. A moment of clarity came when I was perusing blog postings by IvyMain, a D.C.…
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Brat’s Strange Immigrant-Bashing
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in Business and Economy, Crime, Corrections, Law Enforcement, Demographics, Economic development, Electoral process, Federal issues, Health Care, Housing, Immigration, Labor and Workforce, Media, Money in politics, Politics, Poverty & income gap, Property rights, Public safety & health, Race and Race Relations, Regulations, Gov’t Oversight, Social Services and Entitlements, UncategorizedBy Peter Galuszka It must have been an interesting scene. Congressional candidate David Brat had been invited to a meeting of the Virginia Hispanic Chamber of Commerce along with his Democratic rival Jack Trammell to outline his views on immigration and undocumented aliens. Brat, an obscure economics professor who nailed powerhouse Eric Cantor in a…
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More Coal Industry Propaganda
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By Peter Galuszka If you read a blog posting just below this (the one with the coal miner with an intense look on his grit-covered face), you will see how hyperbole, confusion, misunderstanding, ignorance and one-sided arguments twist something very important to all Virginians – how to deal with carbon dioxide and climate change –…
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Burbs Beware: Office Jobs Moving Back to D.C.
Not only are Millennials migrating to the Washington metropolitan region’s urban core, it seems that businesses are, too, in a reversal of the decades-long trend of businesses moving out of the central city to outlying counties. Vacancy rates have risen in Washington, D.C., due to the contraction of legal services and government contracting tied to federal…
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Good Ruling on Congressional Redistricting
By Peter Galuszka A panel of federal judges in Richmond has scrambled the carefully laid plans of legislators, most of them Republicans, to pack African-American voters into one congressional district to give the GOP an advantage in some of the state’s 10 other districts. The panel of U.S. District Court judges decreed that the General…
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Millennials Want a New Kind of Suburbia
by James A. Bacon The Millennial Generation (18- to 29-years old) will be a predominantly suburban generation, contends a new study by the Demand Institute based on a survey of 1,000 Millennial households. Significant majorities of the younger generation aspire to owning a single-family home and consider automobiles a necessity, while a 48% plurality expresses a preference…
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The Fickle Patterns of Population Growth
Except for a brief period during the Civil War, the population of Virginia has increased steadily as long as anyone has kept track. But the pattern of growth varied as the nation evolved from an agriculture-based economy to an industrial economy and then to a knowledge-based economy. Many once-dynamic jurisdictions have gone into decline and,…
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Tobacco Commission Needs Huge Makeover
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in Business and Economy, Consumer Protection, Courts and law, Crime, Corrections, Law Enforcement, Demographics, Economic development, Education (higher ed), Education (K-12), Electoral process, Energy, Environment, Health Care, Infrastructure, Labor and Workforce, Land use & Development, Money in politics, Planning, Politics, Public safety & health, Social Services and Entitlements, UncategorizedBy Peter Galuszka One more glaring example of mass corruption in Virginia is the grandly named Virginia Tobacco Indemnification and Community Revitalization Commission formed 14 years ago to dole out Virginia’s share of a $206 billion settlement among 45 other states with cigarette makers. I’ve been writing for years about how millions of dollars are…
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The Simple, Lovable Sidewalk
By Peter Galuszka Forever humble, the simple sidewalk is becoming an issue in land planning and transportation. In densely-populated populated urban areas, sidewalks have been a staple of living since the time of the Ancient Greeks. They were classics in the familiar grid plans that marked most American towns in the 19th and early 20th…
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Hope for Small Cities
by James A. Bacon Many economists contend that the economic deck is stacked against America’s small cities. Labor markets in the knowledge economy favor large cities; corporations are drawn to large labor markets where they have a bigger pool of prospective employees to recruit from; employees are drawn to larger labor markets where they have more employers…
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Surprise — People Who Live in the Burbs Like Living There
Americans living in the suburbs are more satisfied with their communities overall than their counterparts in urban or rural areas, finds the new Atlantic Media/Siemens State of the City Poll. Eighty-four percent of suburban residents rated their communities excellent or good, compared to 75% of urban dwellers and 78% of rural residents. That finding seems all the…
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Map of the Day: Best and Worst States for Underprivileged Children
WalletHub has struck again, compiling a basket of indicators measuring the well being of poor children, including such factors as the percentage in foster care, the percentage in single-parent families, the percentage in below-poverty households, the percentage that are malnourished, the percentage experiencing food insecurity and the percentage that are homeless. By these measures, Virginia ranked 10th…
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Cantor’s Self-Serving Special Election Scheme
By Peter Galuszka It looks like a small group of the Virginia Republicans elite has once again hatched a plot behind closed doors to manipulate elected politics without input from voters. U.S. Rep. Eric Cantor, the victim of a surprising defeat in a June 10 Republican primary, has come up with a self-serving scheme to…
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The Happy Map
Just one more happiness post, and I’ll quit for now. This map comes from the study mentioned two posts below, “Unhappy Cities,” by Edward L. Glaeser, Joshua D. Gottlieb, and Oren Ziv, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. When viewed as a geographic phenomenon, happiness appears to be associated with the Southeastern and Inter-Mountain states. Glaeser et al…