Florida is committing demographic and economic suicide by trading our youngs for other states' olds

2nd oldest (getting older). 2nd lowest share (decreasing) of native Floridians. It's why we're a low wage, bad education, high cost of living state. The "State of I-4" is the only hope for a future.

Florida’s economic and political “leaders” continue to trade young (and often native) Floridians employed in vital public sectors — teachers, nurses, police, etc. — for old people who are not employed, but who accumulated capital somewhere else they want to deplete here on an extended vacation.

See this breakdown of the 490,000 Floridians who left Florida last year by generation. (And you can argue that Gen X is youngish — still prime working years at least. I’m an Xer; and I still think of myself as a young, TBH.)

Our state policy of trading youngs for olds is why Florida’s share of native-to-state population is second lowest in the country. Forty-three percent of Floridians were native to Florida in 1950. And that was low. Today it’s down to 33 percent and dropping fast. See the chart below I created from Census data.

Only Nevada, which is more a collection of casinos than a state, has a smaller portion of native-born Nevadans. But Nevada is young — 36th lowest portion of over 65 population. It’s building its tourist state as a home for the young people who move there to work in it.

A bellwether “state” that isn’t

No other story in Florida really matters because this demographic story drives all the rest — from forced birth to inflation to transportation to housing to labor. And it’s the reason Florida will matter less and less to America in the generation to come. Florida looks nothing like America and has nothing to offer America, as a state, except vacations, understaffed nursing homes, and a model of what not to be. We are full of people who have already lived their lives and don’t care about yours.

This is why — beyond his gross weirdness — Ron DeSantis crashed and burned, even in a national GOP primary. Americans want to visit and exploit, not emulate, Florida. We have become a foreign, freakish concept of a state.

Look at how out of whack our population origin profile is with both the country as a whole and the states generally considered our peers and/or competition. I created this chart from Census data. One of these is not like the others.

For now, Florida’s exodus-of-youngs is masked in raw numbers by the import-of-olds. But that’s only as long as the olds want to keep coming to a state that is no longer cheap and which cannot staff their needs. Florida’s annual population growth has already slowed to half the rate of the 1970-1995 period. And population growth, weighted to retirees, which is an extension of tourism, is Florida’s only real industry.

Everyone seems to assume the olds will keep coming, just like they assumed real estate values could never crash.

See this from my favorite state agency, the Florida Legislature’s Office of Economic and Demographic Research (EDR), which the elected clerks in our state government —and the economic power behind them — ignore year after year after year. Note the red lines, which are mine:

Moreover — and I don’t have data on this; it’s just feel that I will try to confirm — I suspect most of Florida’s retirement in-migration until now has been funded by the security and predictability of defined benefit pensions. I wonder if the destruction of pensions as a widespread retirement benefit has contributed to reduction in Florida’s population growth rate and will accelerate reduced migration in the future.

And remember, it’s not just the out-migration of youngs that the armies of olds must overwhelm numerically to sustain Florida’s population growth industry. They also have to come at a rate that replaces their pre-cursor olds who die here. Again, Florida has fallen below replacement rate for organic population. See this slide from EDR:

I’ll dive into EDR’s most recent “Economic Overview” in a different article. There’s tons of interesting stuff.

You can’t forced birth your way out of this problem

Trading youngs-for-olds is likely why we have such a massive pregnancy termination rate in Florida.

It’s shocking, but not surprising, that a state as old as Florida is the “red state” champion, by a mile, of abortion, at 80,000 per year. Florida Woman votes at scale with her body on the merits of Florida Man and the Florida Model of life despite all the cruelty and brutality the Stargels and Canadys inflict on her.

It’s shocking, but not surprising, that the same exact people who have long made it state policy to trade youngs-for-olds want to turn low capital women into captive breeding stock with 6-week forced birth. This appears to be their only answer — along with increasing child labor — for addressing the fallout of Florida’s long-standing youngs-for-olds human trade policy.

But just look at the math, without even accounting for the hideous morality.

80,000 unterminated pregnancies will not make up for 300,000-ish youngs leaving the state, especially when those unterminated pregnancies won’t bear worker fruit for 15 years or so. And Florida already has more yearly deaths than births now.

So let me ask you: do you think that this forced birth, breeding stock attitude toward young women makes it harder or easier to recruit 29-year-old nurses to Florida, which is probably the number one profile our state needs?

I’d ask about teachers, too; but Florida policymakers don’t care about teachers — beyond hating their unions — because they don’t serve the old.

The idea of home: the difference between Young Texas and Old Florida

Florida and Texas are in a regular competition for cruelest, craziest, and most corrupt state government. And yet the styles and vibes of the cruel, crazy, and corrupt governing have always seemed different to me. I couldn’t really articulate it until I saw the three charts (two of which I created) that follow.

This first one is about age. Texas has the third smallest percentage of 65-plus residents (Georgia is 4th smallest); Florida has the second largest.

The second chart is population origin.

The third chart is percentage of people born in a state who still live in that state today.

Texas is young, 55 percent native born, with the lowest rate of out-migration by Texas-born Texans of any state.

Young Texas is full of people either born there — or who came there to make a home rather than retire. Those people are fighting it out for the nature and future of their home. The people who think of Texas as home control its politics, both “right” and “left,” to the extent those words have any meaning.

I suspect that is why voucher bills have failed in Texas over and over again, despite GOP control of government and fanatic support from the gross governor there. People who care about home, regardless of ideology, also tend to care about public schools. That’s why Florida’s state system is so bad — arguably the worst in the country if test data is your measure.

Thus, Texas — far more than even Florida — epitomizes the stupid American Civil War imposed on normal people by gross, often criminal, fake Christian freaks. Florida is more of a goofy side-show in that action, especially now that DeSantis will never be president. Texas, by contrast, is Ground Zero for the American future.

Indeed, look at how closely Texas mirrors the U.S. population origin breakdown.

Whoever wins Texas politically in the next 20 years wins the direction of the country for the next 100, in my view. And that political outcome is uncertain. Then look again at Florida.

Take a look at how Florida looks on a map graphic compared to the US in native born population.

We’re the second oldest state, with the second smallest percentage of native born residents.

Florida is run by people who get rich off people who don’t live here yet

Thus, the political, economic, and institutional power of people like me (4th generation Floridian) who care about Florida as a home — left and right — is dwarfed by the political, economic, and institutional power of people who call somewhere else home.

Many of these people think of Florida as some kind of late-life pleasure island and/or extended spring break for inheritance bros. A few don’t; and I have great respect and love for them. I am not anti-immigrant in any way — foreign or domestic. I will share a home happily with anyone who shares that idea of home with me.

(We’ll talk about foreign immigration in a different essay. But it’s worth noting that New York and California both have far larger percentages of foreign-born state population than Florida or Texas, despite all the “invasion” smack talk of those two gross state governments.)

Unlike Texas, Florida’s near-to-mid-term political outcome is not uncertain. The party of people born in other states is going to run/loot our state for a long, long time.

Without a massive change in demographic direction, we won’t matter at all to the future of America’s body politic. We’re basically an inflamed political appendix until our economic and social model grounds itself down and creates a new model. We’ll be priced into national campaigns as a GOP state and ignored. Democrats have already proven they can win presidential elections comfortably without Florida. We’ve made ourselves nationally irrelevant, despite the fact that gross Florida men think they can dominate the country.

Moreover, I don’t think Floridians can vote our way out of the terrible state government that our uncanny demographics produce without a 2008-style crash of the model — and perhaps not even then. After all, 2008 itself didn’t even change the trajectory.

It will likely take forces much larger than simple political economy to alter Florida’s trajectory meaningfully — climate change and a redirection of the olds to some other cheaper warm state.

Say goodbye to your kids and grandkids

I focused on Texas and Georgia because that’s where Florida’s small and shrinking mobile young middle class with skills is going to create homes and futures. Specifically, they’re going to the Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston areas, not the rural “red” areas of those states.

If you’re a Florida “leader” — or an old — you should care about Texas and Georgia, too. The “blue” parts of those states are snapping up your most valuable potential workers and caregivers — the same “woke” kids you hate and bad mouth all the time — and plugging them into their own states.

So we’ll see how long all that anti-woke shit lasts in Texas and Georgia, too.

But even in the throes of their own gross political anti-wokeitude and forced-birth brutality, Texas and Georgia both offer a young Floridian with skills or credentials much more than this:

Come to Florida, olds, where we expect you to buy groceries from Publix with money you made elsewhere, buy prodigious amounts of air-conditioning from power utilities, price the youngs out of housing, and contribute nothing to the future.

That’s been Florida’s strategic plan for quite a while now — financed politically by the small handful of businesses that benefit from it. (You know who you are.)

The youngs with options have noticed.

“Stickiness” is not a choice for most youngs

Everything I’ve shown you until now makes this fact the more remarkable: Florida’s out migration of its native born is low, at least as of 2021. (I think it’s certainly accelerated since then; but I don’t have precise numbers.)

We had the seventh lowest emigration rate of native born Floridians in 2021. Despite that, the share of our native born population continues to shrink rapidly — and the youngs dominate our large annual out-migration. How can that be?

1. Native born Floridians aren’t having kids.

2. I suspect our “sticky” population is either like me (inheritor of some capital that makes Florida a pleasant choice) or inheritor of zero capital, which makes emigration extremely difficult to impossible. The young people between those two groups — young cops, nurses, and teachers — are leaving, as the article I opened this whole piece with bears out:

The typical mover leaving Florida is a millennial who makes nearly $48,000 a year, isn't married, and moved to Georgia or Texas.

A Business Insider analysis of individual-level data from the Census Bureau's 2022 ACS, assembled by the University of Minnesota's IPUMS program, found that movers leaving Florida were slightly younger, more often single, and employed at higher rates than movers to Florida.

While many are moving to Florida for its beaches, lack of state income tax, and business opportunities, many are getting priced out or seeking a quieter pace of life. Some former Floridians told BI that Florida lost its feeling of "paradise" as home insurance prices skyrocketed.

And Florida’s class of low capital, but skilled and career-based youngs is already small. That’s why we have all the police, teacher, nursing shortages.

The larger class of youngs who are left behind, who weren’t born with capital and haven’t found predictable career-based income, are largely trapped in an immobile low wage service working class. They will always have jobs if they want them because there just aren’t that many workers. Florida will always be a low unemployment state, just mathematically.

But in many cases, because of housing and transportation and child care costs, it will be a day-to-day decision for the youngs in this class as to whether their shit job at your small business or big box store is worth going to.

That probably means inflation will continue to be elevated here, as competition for scarce workers drives up wages, but at a slower rate than increases in the total capital costs of a middle class life: housing; car: gas, insurance, and maintenance; child care; health care. That’s a bad spiral, where nobody ever finds real stability — business or labor, unless you’re a corporate giant that benefits from the spiral itself. (You know who you are.)

And the kids in this captive class are the same kids who fill our traditional public schools — rather than magnets or charters — and who often get grifted for a year or two by voucher scams so they can avoid useless testing.

I thought about these kids and their lives every day when I was a School Board member. I think about them every day now.

They are smart, diverse, funny, talented, deeply aware of adult bullshit, and vastly undercapitalized. Economic and political power wastes their potential contributions to our state life because it would prefer to keep them as cheap disposable labor widgets to serve an economic model aimed at somebody who lives in Ohio or upstate New York today.

Capital in Florida thinks this kind of captive working class is good for it. All its public policy power is devoted to keeping it immobile and dependent. You can see this view on display in this really silly description of “stickiness” from Axios.

I disagree that this is good, for capital or the state as a whole; but what do I know?

The State of I-4 is Florida’s only shot at a future

Spend a little time on this interactive map of over-65 population percentage. It is crazy. Hover over the high growth Southwest Florida counties and the counties in blue and dark blue just north of the I-4 Corridor, which I circled. Sarasota County: 37%; Charlotte: 40%; Lee: 32%; Collier: 32%; Sumter: 57% (that’s The Villages). Who the hell actually works in Sumter County?

Remember, the U.S. percentage of over 65 population is 17%

I am lucky, a minority of a minority of a minority — born and raised in Florida, with a little bit of inherited capital I used to accumulate a little more capital to help my kids.

I live in one of the few mid-sized cities in Florida (Lakeland) that is self-consciously focused on the idea of home. And I’m sandwiched inland between Florida’s youngest counties and two of its leading cities — Tampa and Orlando. Orange, Osceola, and Hillsborough counties all have 14 percent or less over-65 population. Polk has 20 percent, slightly lower than Florida as a whole. (My part of Polk feels much younger.)

The State of I-4, as circled above, is the only geography in Florida I would consider living in if I was starting over today. It’s really the only part of Florida that looks like a real state, demographically. The Tampa, Lakeland, and Orlando belt will withstand whatever befalls Florida when the olds stop coming — and they will.

Inland migration from the coasts is likely to drive population and economic growth where I am for at least a generation. Maybe by then we’ll see the return and the rise of the Florida youngs.

Until then, I’ll be fighting as best as I can for the youngs of today who share a home with me within the State of I-4, so that we can keep it a sustainably livable place. I have not remotely given up on a creating a decent future within my part of my state, as my repeated acts of confrontational public citizenship demonstrate.

I get in people’s faces because I give a shit; and I try to pay attention to the forces that shape my life and the lives of my loved ones and fellow citizens.

Every GOP legislator and most state officials I know have given up and just surrendered to this demographic and political reality, while hoping to scarf up some spoils before the olds stop coming — and they will.

That’s why, if Florida was a stock I would short it.