Category: Demographics
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Rural Virginia Does Not Need A Marshall Plan
In devastated post-war Europe, millions of people were qualified and eager for jobs or desperate for capital to get their farms planted and harvested. In demographically-diminishing rural Virginia, farms are mechanized. If you build a huge factory today qualified workers may not come in sufficient numbers. A scaled-down 21st Century Marshall Plan is a nice…
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Has NoVa Finally Woken Up?
VA-10. State Senator Jennifer Wexton (D) hopes to unseat Congresswoman Barbara Comstock (R) in Virginia’s 10th Congressional District. A typically gerrymandered Virginia district, the 10th stretches from inside the Capital Beltway to well west of Winchester. As a resident of the 10th I watch the elections in that district closely. This one is shaping up…
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Has City Population Growth Leveled Off?
After a decade of strong growth, the population of Virginia’s cities may be leveling off, says Hamilton Lombard with the University of Virginia’s Demographics Research Group. The rising cost of housing in Virginia cities is pushing households into neighboring counties, he says. The major swing group is households with young children. For decades, families with…
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Virginia as a Low “Sexism” State
Women of Virginia, great news! Your home state is the least sexist in the South and, though hardly a leader in workplace feminism, comparable in social attitudes to such havens of enlightenment as Maryland, California and Oregon. That’s according to a new research paper, “The Effects of Sexism on American Women: The Role of Norms vs.…
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Graph of the Day: Virginia’s Declining Fertility Rate
The number of births in Virginia continues declining, reaching the lowest level in years in 2017 — only 100,248. A decade before, births had numbered 108,884. Demographers Savannah Quick and Shonel Sen at the Demographics Research Group at the University of Virginia attribute the overall dip in fertility decline to a dramatic decline for 15-…
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Tax Act Impact on Virginia: 5,782 Jobs
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2018 will create 218,000 full-time equivalent jobs across the United States this year, asserts the center-right Tax Foundation, which specializes in analyzing the impact of tax policy on the U.S. economy. Using its Taxes and Growth econometric model, the Tax Foundation provided a job-creation estimate for each of…
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Let’s Celebrate the Red, White and Blue!
Take this for whatever it’s worth: According to a WalletHub survey based on 13 data points encompassing military service, propensity for voting, volunteerism, and civic engagement, Virginia ranks as the most patriotic state in the United States. (View the ranking and methodology here.) Alaska, No. 2, is close on our heels. But Virginia has a…
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Dillon’s Rule, the RPV and the Marylandization of Virginia
by Don Rippert Doppler shift from red to blue. As recently as 1977 both of Maryland’s US Senators were Republican. From 1993 through 2003 Maryland’s eight US House seats were evenly split between Republicans and Democrats. Today, Maryland’s 10 person Congressional delegation consists of 9 Democrats and a lone Republican. This shift caused Maryland to…
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Virginia Is for Psychos
I don’t know how good the social science is, but this is too good to pass up. A study by Ryan H. Murphy, an economics professor at Southern Methodist University, has ranked the 48 contiguous U.S. states by “psychopathy,” or anti-social behavior. It is disconcerting to see the Old Dominion ranking No. 10 on the…
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What the 2018 Tax Cuts Mean for Virginia
How will the tax cuts from the 2018 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act impact Virginia households? The results vary considerably by income bracket, according to a tax calculator published by the Tax Foundation. Higher income households, making over $200,000 per year, will get the biggest income tax breaks as measured in absolute dollars and by…
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Is the Urban Growth Boom Fading?
Several years ago Brookings Institution urbanist William H. Frey proclaimed the 2010s as “the decade of the city.” A constellation of forces in the knowledge economy, which puts a premium on dense, mixed-use urban environments with access to mass transit, was pulling Millennials and corporations back into central cities. It was a logic that I…
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Map of the Day: State/Local Income Tax Collections
The latest from the Tax Foundation. Virginia has the highest income tax collections per capita in the Southeast. Could that help explain slower economic growth and reversal in migration patterns?
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Map of the Day: Religiosity by State
Statistically, Virginia ranks among the most religious states in the United States, according to a new Gallup report. But among Bible Belt states, Virginia and Florida are the least religious. The numbers are based upon 130,959 interviews conducted in Gallup’s U.S. Daily survey in 2017. Here’s the breakdown of how Virginians described their adherence to religion:…
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Map of the Day: Changes in Probability of Death
It’s not new news anymore that gains in life expectancy have leveled off in the United States, driven by startling and unexpected declines among young and middle-aged whites. The so-called “deaths of despair,” including drug overdoses, are on the rise. So are liver disease (associated with alcoholism) and suicides. Chronic diseases associated with obesity such…
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Chart of the Day: Household Income Distribution by Region
Our friends over at the Demographics Research Group at the University of Virginia continue to display data in interesting ways. The chart above breaks the state into eight demographic regions and then plots the median household income by locality. As can be seen, there is significant variability within regions — particularly in Northern Virginia and…