The Dog That Didn't Bark

Here’s an interesting NY Times story about how people in their 20’s and 30’s are abandoning upstate New York for locales South and West:

In almost every place upstate, emigration rates were highest among college graduates, producing a brain drain, according to separate analyses of census results for The New York Times by two demographers, William Frey of the Brookings Institution and Andrew A. Beveridge of Queens College of the City University of New York. Among the nation’s large metropolitan areas, Professor Frey said, Buffalo and Rochester had the highest rates of what he called “bright flight.”

Irwin L. Davis, president of the Metropolitan Development Association in Syracuse, which promotes economic growth in central New York, said, “We’re educating them and they’re leaving.”

And Gary D. Keith, vice president and regional economist for M & T Bank, said, “Sluggish job growth is the biggest driver of out-migration among young upstate adults.”

The decline in the 1990’s in the population ages 18 to 44 of the 52-county upstate region was “chilling,” he said.

“When the jobs don’t grow, the people go,” Mr. Keith said.

More interesting, however, is what the Times can’t bring itself to say in the story: there isn’t a single mention of New York’s high taxes and rampant government regulatory regimes, or the relative lack therof in the (er, “red”) Sun Belt states. Was it just too much trouble for the Times to admit that jobs (and thus people) are leaving for places that are more ameniable to, you know, employers?

Apparently so. Like Old Europe, America’s high-tax, high-regulation states are literally pricing themselves out of the job market–and they’re losing population as a result. Pity the “newspaper of record” can’t bring itself to say so.