I don’t know how many folks caught “free market” water boy, Art Woolf’s set up in Thursday’s Free Press, but I can guarantee you’ll hear it quoted soon as source material for more GOP whining about how Vermont is “bad for business.”
The article, entitled “Where Have All the Babies Gone?” focusses on the declining birthrate in Vermont since just prior to the “official” start of the recession in 2007. It notes only parenthetically that the birthrate in the U.S. as a whole has declined over the same period; and it provides a Vermont-only bar chart illustrating the decline since 1990.
Look for this chart and the accompanying statistics, minus the parenthetical qualifier, to be frequently quoted as evidence that Vermont’s regulatory environment under a Democratic majority is causing young people to flee the state at an alarming and unnatural rate.
Mr. Woolf reports that there has been a decline in the Vermont birthrate since 2007 of 7%; however, when compared to the national decline in birthrate of 12% for the same period, this is little more than half of that figure.
Just as alarm over the “aging” of the Vermont population is a canard invented by Republicans to have something to cluck about; so also will be the “baby drain” meme.
The reality is that, by most economic indicators, Vermont has survived the recession better than the majority of other states; and despite its overwhelming Democratic majority, the state seems to have a pretty good formula for offsetting a harsh climate with a social and environmental mystique that still attracts people to settle here.
In fact, if there is such a great concern among Republicans for the declining birthrate in Vermont, or the loss of younger workers, perhaps they should be advocating for more relaxed immigration policies, favoring Mexican and Latin American families who statistically represent the American sectors where population growth continues to be higher.
Oh, no…’guess not. That would just broaden support for Democratic candidates.
…and their ambitions and their p-whipped low-sperm-count* husbands and their birth control! C’mon, gals, get yer biscuits in the oven and yer buns in the bed!
*It’s a well-known scientific fact that men in relationships with feminists suffer losses in potency. See Akin, Todd, Manual of Traditional Medicine.
Strangely Mr. Woolf does not suggest the obvious, his Republican friends need to stop with the birth-control. In this case, they do hold the cards to correct the situation. If every Republican woman of childbearing age, whatever that is, did just that and had a child in the next year or two we could turn this problem around quickly. But again, Woolf comes up with the graph, but misses the obvious solution to the issue.