According to alarmists, everybody under 30 with an IQ higher than their age is leaving Maine. If nothing is done, cry the Cassandras, the state’s population will soon consist entirely of geezers and morons.
On the bright side, the Legislature will finally reflect the electorate.
This demographic shift to geriatric and gibbering may already be at an advanced stage. Just the other day, I spotted this bit of graffiti in the men’s room of one of my favorite bars:
“Why are murders in Maine so hard to solve? Because the DNA is all the same and the dental records do not exist.”
I can pretty much guess which legislators this guy ran into.
But back to the issue at hand. Which, I see by re-reading the start of this column, seems to be about young people leaving Maine. I’m not clear as to why this is a problem. Twenty-somethings have been scuttling across the state line in significant numbers since sometime before the Civil War (the American one, not the thing in Iraq). And for nearly as long, politicians have been predicting this exodus would result in the decline of our state into an asylum suitable only for the geezie and moronic. That hasn’t happened.
Outside of the State House.
And, possibly, Portland City Hall.
It’s true the median age in Maine has increased from just under 39 years old in 2000 to a little over 41 in 2004, while the percentage of children under 9 has declined by about 10 percent. But most people in their 40s could hardly be considered geezers, and kids under 9 are universally recognized as being expensive and annoying.
Even more important is US Census data showing the state gaining population. For every hotshot college grad who hits the road for Boston, New York, or Kuala Lumpur, Maine is attracting a couple of successful mid-lifers or well-to-do retirees. That’s resulted in a net gain of more than 8100 people in the first four years of this decade and placed the state fifth in the nation (just behind Nevada, Arizona, Florida, and Idaho) in attracting in-migrants as a percentage of population.
(OK, I admit that last statistic doesn’t make any more sense than Governor Baldacci’s budget.)
In addition, we now have a new report from the University of Maine’s Office of Institutional Studies (motto: Keeping An Eye On The Asylum Full Of Geezers And Morons), which seems to show that the so-called “brain drain” is barely a splatter of gray matter. The office surveyed UMaine grads from 2004 and 2005 and found that (deep breath) nearly 74 percent of them were employed full time, and of that group about two-thirds lived and worked in Maine, although the chances they remained in the state after school were significantly better if they were from here in the first place. All of which boils down to the fact that about 50 percent of the students who got degrees from the Orono campus decided to stay in Maine and found jobs.
This appears to be one of those glass-half-empty-glass-half-full debates that are so beloved by morons (the Portland Press Herald: “a sobering arithmetic . . . nothing to cheer about”) and geezers (the Bangor Daily News: “a good sign for a state concerned with growing its economy”).
