Spotted
at T-shirts.com
In
keeping with that VITA article you published. (See
"IT
Train Wreck," June 30, 2003) here
is something that I was forwarded – hard to read
but I believe it says “Poor Service, High
Prices.”
Hud
Croasdale
Blacksburg
Virginia
Tech
hcroasda@vt.edu
Domestic
Migration: A Look Behind the Numbers
I
greatly enjoyed your excellent piece on net
migration in the August 11 edition (See "Voting
with their Feet.") While net migration is a
reasonable proxy for a region’s ability to attract
and retain people, the raw measure provided by the
Census Bureau doesn’t tell you much else.
For
a deeper understanding of what the figures are
telling you,
use IRS data as it includes median
incomes for those moving in and out. This way you
can determine if you are replacing high earners with
low earners – or vice versa. IRS also includes the
location to which people are going (out migration)
and from which they are coming (in-migration) so you
can determine where your major competitor regions
are located. Reports are available from the IRS (for
a fee). Some limitations of the IRS data include a
2.5 year-time lag -- Census data is more current --
and a focus only on households filing tax returns.
It does not cover all migrants
like the Census data does.
Another
caution with migration data is that there may be
certain extenuating circumstances behind a change
that have no relation to a region’s
“attractiveness.” For example,
from a peak in the mid-to-late 1980s
to the late 1990s
(the last period for which I have
figures) the Hampton Roads Planning District
Commission estimates
that
the region’s defense sector lost nearly 57,000
civilian defense and uniformed military jobs.
Together with “multiplier effect” jobs lost,
nearly 95,000 jobs were shed from the local economy
due to military downsizing. As a
result of these losses, Hampton Roads experienced a
net out migration during much of the 1990s.
Moreover, on average,
the lost jobs paid 125 percent of the regional
average
so
the
downsizing also had a significant impact on regional
incomes.
These
personnel had no choice in their deployment.
Therefore, an outside influence, in this case a
political decision to downsize the military, so
skewed the data as to render it much less useful as
a proxy for the region’s
attractiveness.
Likewise, the bankruptcy of a major employer in a
small community might have the same effect. This is
not to say that the out migration is not useful in
quantifying a problem to be addressed. In fact,
out migration and other impacts of the military
downsizing have made
industry
diversification a major Hampton Roads
goal for
over 10 years.
All
I wish to suggest is that particularly good or bad
migration numbers are red flags that may suggest an
external cause and not reflective of a region’s
attractiveness. Another good way of determining a
region’s attractiveness, aside from migration
information, is through
surveys
of citizen attitudes about the locality or region.
Such surveys generally show Hampton Roads as having
a good “quality of life” particularly in
cultural and entertainment opportunities.
One
last comment: The Southern Technology Council has
issued a couple of fine reports profiling
“stayers” and “leavers” from a higher
education perspective. These reports
address the
issue, which you also mention in the article, of how
a state keeps more of the young it educates. I
won’t go into the conclusions here but call the
studies to your attention.
Bob
Sharak
Norfolk
Hampton
Roads Partnership
Director
of Special Projects
rsharak@hrp.org
Migrants
to Virginia: Armed and Dangerous?
I
just read the article on State Population Migration
and it was very cool. I have been noticing many
New York license plates in the last few weeks.
I
don't know how much of a factor the gun laws of
states
were, but from casually viewing the data in
your
tables, it does seem to follow what I suspected:
More
oppressive firearm defense states push out many of
their
citizens who try for a better place.
California,
New York, Illinois and New Jersey,
Maryland
and D.C. all have very tough, if not impossible
laws
on buying and getting Concealed Carry Permits for
firearms. Virginia's firearm defense laws are much
easier (as
are
Nevada's).
The
bit about Virginians moving to North Carolina
don't
support that theory too well, because N.C.'s gun
laws
are more restrictive than Virginia's. I assume that
the Virginians had a vacation home, or they just got
sick of our odd weather. :-)
Jesse
Dolan
Richmond
Virginian,
part-time political geek
insanehippie@yahoo.com
www.insanehippie.net
It's
Time to Chuck Chichester
Your
presentation of Chichester in your “Let’s
Get Real” article (Doug Koelemay, August 8,
2003), as a responsible Republican legislator is
ludicrous. Chichester should run as a
Democrat—heck, he even got help from Mark Warner
to beat his primary challenger and asked Democrats
to come out and vote for him in the Republican
primary. That’s a responsible Republican
legislator? Give me a break…
But
I see where you’re coming from. Only in Virginia
are big businesses enamored with higher taxes. In
the rest of the country, businesses want low taxes
and little government interference. I’m not sure
how we got into this predicament in Virginia, but I
suspect that this agenda is being pushed by
developers and other “enlightened” Northern
Virginia businesses who believe that government
should take an active role in running the life of
its citizens—not very different from what
socialists advocate…
I
should note that I don’t believe that the
developers promoting higher taxes is driven by
socialistic principles. On the contrary, they are
hard-core capitalists who believe that they can
increase their profits if only government spending
took care of some of their costs of doing business.
They have, therefore, very cunningly teamed up with
the liberal yuppiefied set that makes up the bulk of
the Northern Virginia high-tech industry, advocating
new taxes. But this is nothing new. These same folks
have been promoting higher taxes for our state
throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and no matter how
many times they get humiliatingly defeated, they
come back. You've got to hand it to them for their
persistence.
Worse,
when businesses start promoting an activist
socialist agenda, that should be a wake-up call to
all who believe in our capitalist system. You
pointed out how businesses were supporting the
mandatory seat-belt law. What core business interest
would such activism address? The argument that this
would reduce insurance rates is a bunch of malarkey;
if that were so, it would have little effect on the
business bottom line because the beneficiaries would
benefit would be private policy holders. To my
knowledge insurance companies didn’t rush to
support this legislation offering to lower their
rates. Also, the argument that more federal
transportation dollars would flow into the State is
nothing more than wishful thinking. As to the
argument that a two-term governor would be better
for long-term planning, Californians would think
that you’re out of your mind given their recent
experiences.
Furthermore,
your comment about looming budget deficits has yet
to materialize. Although we’ve been hearing of the
draconian budget cuts for years now, Virginia state
expenditures have increased each and every year.
Last year’s expenditures went up by 7 percent
while this year they went up by 2 percent - -when
all we heard both years was nothing but scary talk
about the serious budget shortfall and the
“cuts” that resulted. Somehow, we’ve redefined
a cut to mean an increase in budgetary outlays…
Bottom
line, when Chichester and Warner are talking about
tax reform, this has become their code word for
higher taxes. Have you forgotten how Chichester
single-handedly blocked Gov. Gilmore’s increase in
the car tax cut rate a few years back? Chichester is
nothing more than a tax and spend liberal—a prime
example of why we need to enact term limits.
Phillip
Rodokanakis
Oak
Hill
phil_r@cox.net
