Michael Barone
The Washington Examiner
10/30/2013
Where are Americans moving, and why? Timothy Noah, writing in the Washington Monthly, professes to be puzzled. He points out that people have been moving out of states with high cheapest viagra to buy online in uk per capita incomes — Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, Maryland — to states with lower income levels.
“Why are Americans by and large moving away from economic opportunity rather than toward it?” he asks.
Actually, it’s not puzzling at all. The movement from high-tax, high-housing-cost states to low-tax, low-housing-cost states has been going on for more than 40 years, as I note in my new book Shaping Our Nation: How Surges of Migration Transformed America and Its Politics…
…Contrary to Noah’s inference, people don’t move away from opportunity. They move partly in response to economic incentives, but also to pursue dreams and escape nightmares.
Opportunity does exist in the Northeastern states and in California — for people with very high skill levels. And for low-skill immigrants, without whom those metro areas would have lost rather than gained population over the last three decades.
But there’s not much opportunity there for people with midlevel skills who want to raise families. Housing costs are exceedingly high, partly, as Noah notes, because of restrictive land use and zoning regulations.
And central city public schools, with a few exceptions, repel most middle-class parents…
Read the complete op-ed at The Washington Examiner.
