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Overdose deaths are down nationally, but up in many Western states

Tim Henderson — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 09:40:26 +0000

Photos of fentanyl victims are on display at a memorial at the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration headquarters in Arlington, Va. Federal data shows that overdose deaths are rising in Western states even as many states in the East are seeing improvement; the spread of fentanyl may explain much of the geographic movement, experts say. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Despite an encouraging national dip in the past year, overdose deaths are still on the rise in many Western states as the epicenter of the nation’s continuing crisis shifts toward the Pacific Coast, where deadly fentanyl and also methamphetamine are finding more victims.

Overdose deaths remain sharply higher since 2019. Many states are working on “harm reduction” strategies that stress cooperation with people who use drugs; in some cases, states are getting tougher on prosecutions, with murder charges for dealers.

Alaska, Nevada, Washington and Oregon have moved into the top 10 for rate of overdose deaths since 2023, according to a Stateline analysis of federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. Meanwhile the biggest one-year improvements were in Nebraska (down 30%), North Carolina (down 23%), and Vermont, Ohio and Pennsylvania (all down 19%).

In Kentucky, overdose deaths declined 18% since 2023. But fatal overdoses remain high in Kentucky at 43 per 100,000 population, the nation’s ninth highest rate.

The spread of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that can cause overdose and death even in tiny amounts, explains much of the east-to-west movement in the number of deaths, said Daliah Heller, vice president of overdose prevention program at Vital Strategies, an international advocacy group that works on strengthening public health.

“Fentanyl really came in through the traditional drug markets in the Northeast, but you can see this steady movement westward,” Heller said. “So now we’re seeing overdoses going up on the West Coast while they’re going down dramatically on the East Coast.”

The provisional CDC data estimates drug overdose deaths in the year ending with April 2024, and nationally they decreased by 10%, with more than 11,000 fewer deaths than the year before. But they’re still rising in 10 states and the District of Columbia, including 42% in Alaska, 22% in Oregon, 18% in Nevada and 14% in Washington state. Deaths climbed by almost 1,300 in those states and others with more modest increases: Colorado, Utah and Hawaii.

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Experts are still debating why some Eastern states hit early in the overdose crisis are seeing improvements.

“There’s some kind of improvement spreading from east to west and we don’t know exactly what it is yet. Everybody sees their little piece of the elephant,” said Nabarun Dasgupta, a scientist specializing in opioid disorder and overdose at the University of North Carolina’s Injury Prevention Research Center.

In North Carolina and other states with recent improvements, “it feels like we finally got a lid on the pot, but the pot is still boiling over. Things aren’t really cooling down,” Dasgupta said.

It could be a result of better acceptance of harm reduction policies to help those who use drugs, including no-questions-asked testing of street drugs and providing naloxone to counteract overdoses. Or users may simply be getting more wary of fentanyl and its dangers and unpleasant side effects, Dasgupta said.

"It feels like we finally got a lid on the pot, but the pot is still boiling over. Things aren't really cooling down." - Nabarun Dasgupta, University of North Carolina Injury Prevention Research Center

“Fentanyl is very potent, but potency isn’t the only thing. Otherwise we’d all be drinking the highest proof IPAs (India pale ales),” Dasgupta said.Alaska now has the nation's second-highest rate of drug overdose deaths, about 53 per 100,000 population, behind only West Virginia (73 per 100,000). Other Western states that are now in the top 10: Nevada (47 per 100,000), Washington state (46 per 100,000) and Oregon (45 per 100,000).

The CDC data shows Alaska had the largest increase from 2023 — up 42%, to 390 deaths. Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy in August 2023 proposed legislation making fentanyl dealers subject to murder charges in overdose death cases, writing: “Drugs and drug overdoses have had a devastating effect on our state.” The legislation was signed into law this year.

In May, the state kicked off “One Pill Can Kill,” a national?awareness campaign?warning about the dangers of fentanyl.

Fentanyl, mostly in the form of counterfeit 30 mg oxycodone pills, has become tremendously profitable for smugglers in Alaska who make use of airline passengers and air shipments of other products to get drugs into the state, said state Department of Public Safety spokesperson Austin McDaniel. Pills that sell for less than $1 near the U.S. southern border with Mexico can fetch $20 in Alaska, McDaniel said.

“We want to make the dealers think twice about targeting Alaska,” said Alaska state Rep. Craig Johnson, an Anchorage Republican, who supported the bill signed into law July 12.

Johnson’s 23-year-old nephew died of a fentanyl overdose two years ago. “This is personal. I don’t want other Alaska families to go through what we went through. I hope we never have to use it, because that will mean nobody else died.”

Other state and federal authorities are also trying a more punitive approach to the fentanyl crisis: Under a state program in Wisconsin meant to ferret out suppliers, three people were arrested in September and charged with first-degree reckless homicide in the fentanyl overdose death of a 27-year-old man.

First responders work on a victim of an apparent overdose in Albuquerque, N.M., in August. Despite an encouraging national decrease in overdoses, deaths are still rising in many Western states. (Tim Henderson/Stateline)

In Michigan, two men pleaded guilty this month to federal charges in a mass fentanyl poisoning that led to at least six deathsSuch punitive approaches can backfire, experts say, if they drive people toward more dangerous solitary drug use — where no one can see an overdose and try to help — and away from programs such as free testing to unearth fentanyl hidden in other drugs.

“It’s sort of nonsensical, like saying you can beat something out of people. People are still going to use drugs,” said Heller, of Vital Strategies. “This should be a call to action to wake up and really invest in a response to drug use as a health issue.”

In Nevada, health authorities in the Las Vegas area are stressing more cooperation with residents who use drugs, increasing naloxone distribution and encouraging people to submit their drug purchases for testing so they’re not surprised by counterfeit heroin, methamphetamine or other drugs that are increasingly cut with cheaper fentanyl, said Jessica Johnson, health education supervisor for the Southern Nevada Health District.

For second year in a row, Kentucky overdose deaths decrease?

A state office coordinates goals for county naloxone distribution based on factors such as hospital reports of overdoses. More overdoses trigger more naloxone distribution to community centers, clinics, entertainment venues and even vending machines.

One puzzle in Nevada and in other states is that increasingly, overdoses involve a combination of opioids, such as fentanyl, along with stimulants such as methamphetamine. Almost a third of overdoses in Nevada are caused by both being used together, according to a state report based on 2022 data.

It could be that some people seek the “roller coaster of effects using a stimulant like methamphetamine and a depressant like fentanyl or heroin,” Jessica Johnson said, but mostly she hears that unsuspecting users get cocaine or methamphetamine that’s been cut with cheaper fentanyl.

“We get people saying, ‘Oh I don’t need naloxone because I don’t use fentanyl,’ and our team is able to say, ‘Well, our surveillance data actually suggests there might be fentanyl in your methamphetamine’ or whatever it is.”

Nationally, both drugs are increasingly a factor in fatal overdoses: Synthetic opioids such as fentanyl contributed to 68% of overdose deaths in this year’s CDC data, up from 48% in 2019. Stimulants such as methamphetamine were factors in 35% of deaths, up from 20% in 2019.

Heroin and other partly natural opioids, such as oxycodone, have diminished as factors, together accounting for 13% of deaths in the latest data compared with 40% in 2019.

Some experts theorize that the high potency of fentanyl makes those who use drugs want to tweak or balance the effect with methamphetamine. Fentanyl itself is often cut with xylazine, a non-opioid animal tranquilizer — often known as “tranq” — that can cause unpleasant side effects, including extreme sedation and skin lesions, Dasgupta said.

“During the pandemic, there were a lot of reasons why people were using substances more. Now that things are different, people are tired of the adulteration, the sedation, the skin wounds,” Dasgupta said. “People may take lower doses, and that in itself can help lower overdoses.”

This story is republished from Stateline, a sister publication to the Kentucky Lantern and part of the nonprofit States Newsroom network.

Rent is eating up a greater share of tenants’ income in almost every state

Tim Henderson — Mon, 16 Sep 2024 09:40:58 +0000

An apartment maintenance man changes the lock of an apartment after constables posted an eviction order in Phoenix. In Arizona, low wages, a housing shortage, and short-term rental and vacation homes are eating away at the stock of affordable housing for renters. (John Moore/Getty Images)

There were 21 states where a majority of tenant households spent 30% or more of their incomes on rent and utilities last year, compared with just seven states in 2019.

Nationwide, about 22 million?renters are shouldering that percentage.?Anyone paying more than 30% is considered “cost burdened,” according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and may struggle to pay for other necessities, such as food, clothing, transportation and medical care.

In Kentucky, housing consumed 30% of income or more for 47.5% of renter households, up from 43.3% in 2019.

Three presidential swing states had among the biggest increases in the share of renters who spent that much on housing: Arizona (to 54% from 46.5%), Nevada (to 57.4% from 51.1%) and Georgia (to 53.7% from 48.4%). The numbers are based on a Stateline analysis of American Community Survey data released today by the U.S. Census Bureau. Florida and Maine also saw large jumps.

In Arizona, low wages, a housing shortage, and short-term rental and vacation homes are eating away at the stock of affordable housing for renters,?according to Alison Cook-Davis, associate director for research at Arizona State University’s Morrison Institute for Public Policy.

“You’ve got people across the state kind of pulling their hair out, saying ‘I thought Arizona was supposed to be the affordable state,’” Cook-Davis said.

Rents in Arizona have shot up 40% to 60% in the last two years, she said. And the state’s eviction filings spiked 43% to 97,000 between 2022 and 2023, she said.

In places such as Arizona and Nevada where the housing bubble of the late 2000s left vacant houses, the construction of apartments and other homes has not caught up with population increases, Cook-Davis added.

A University of Nevada, Las Vegas,?data brief reported in May that the Las Vegas area had the highest percentage of cost-burdened renters in the state, at 58.3%, more even than the New York City metro area (52.6%) or San Francisco metro area (48.9%).

Census figures released last week showed that in addition to Arizona, Nevada and Georgia, the states with the highest jumps in the share of cost-burdened renters were Florida, which increased to 61.7% from 55.9%, and Maine, at 49.1% from 44%.

That jump left Florida as the state with the highest rate of cost-burdened renters. It was followed by Nevada (57.4%), Hawaii (56.7%), Louisiana (56.2%) and California (56.1%).

“Florida isn’t the deal it used to be,” said Christopher McCarty, director of the University of Florida’s Bureau of Economic and Business Research. “Florida still has disproportionately lower-paying jobs compared to other states, and rents are increasing compared to other states as well.”

The states with the lowest rates of cost-burdened renters as of 2023 were North Dakota (37%), Wyoming (41.2%), South Dakota (41.3%), Kansas (43.5%) and Nebraska (44%).

The share of cost-burdened renters increased since 2019 in every state except Vermont (down to 47.8% from 54%), Wyoming (down to 41.2% from 44%), North Dakota (down to 37% from 38%) and Rhode Island (down to 48.1% from 49%).

There’s hope for the future in Arizona and other states with increased home construction, Cook-Davis said.

“If you keep building, eventually this will sort itself out. But that could take years. It’s a slow process,” she said.

This story is republished from Stateline, a sister publication to the Kentucky Lantern and part of the nonprofit States Newsroom network.

The number of births continues to fall, despite abortion bans

Tim Henderson — Mon, 20 May 2024 09:50:29 +0000

Children watch as rescue personnel carry a manatee to the water during a mass release of rehabilitated manatees at Blue Spring State Park in Orange City, Fla., in February 2023. The fast-growing state of Florida saw a relatively small birth rate decline of 1% from 2022 to 2023, according to a Stateline analysis. (Phelan M. Ebenhack/Associated Press)

Births continued a historic slide in all but two states last year, making it clear that a brief post-pandemic uptick in the nation’s birth numbers was all about planned pregnancies that had been delayed temporarily by COVID-19.

Only Tennessee and North Dakota had small increases in births from 2022 to 2023, according to a Stateline analysis of provisional federal data on births.

Kentucky’s 51,830 births in 2023 represented a decline of 0.9% from the year before.

In California, births dropped by 5%, or nearly 20,000, for the year. And as is the case in most other states, there will be repercussions now and later for schools and the workforce, said Hans Johnson, a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California who follows birth trends.

“These effects are already being felt in a lot of school districts in California. Which schools are going to close? That’s a contentious issue,” Johnson said.

In the short term, having fewer births means lower state costs for services such as subsidized day care and public schools at a time when aging baby boomers are straining resources. But eventually, the lack of people could affect workforces needed both to pay taxes and to fuel economic growth.

Nationally, births fell by 2% for the year, similar to drops before the pandemic, after rising slightly the previous two years and plummeting 4% in 2020.

“Mostly what these numbers show is [that] the long-term decline in births, aside from the COVID-19 downward spike and rebound, is continuing,” said Phillip Levine, a Wellesley College economics professor.

To keep population the same over the long term, the average woman needs to have 2.1 children over her lifetime — a metric that is considered the “replacement” rate for a population. Even in 2022 every state fell below that rate, according to final data for 2022 released in April. The rate ranged from a high of 2.0 in South Dakota to less than 1.4 in Oregon and Vermont.

Trends for Latina women

The declines in births weren’t as steep in some heavily Hispanic states where abortion was restricted in 2022, including Texas and the election battleground state of Arizona. Births were down only 1% in Arizona and Texas. When health clinics closed, many women might have been unable to get reliable birth control or, if they became pregnant, to get an abortion.

Hispanic births rose in states where abortion is most restricted, even as non-Hispanic births fell in the same states, according to the Stateline analysis. It’s hard, however, to tell how much of a role abortion access played compared with immigration and people moving to growing states such as Texas and Florida.

In states where abortion access is most protected, births fell for both Hispanic and non-Hispanic women.

“The big takeaway to me is the likely increase in poverty for all family members, including children, in families affected by lack of access [to abortion and birth control],” said Elizabeth Gregory, director of the Institute for Research on Women, Gender & Sexuality at the University of Houston.

Many of the nation’s most Hispanic states where abortion and birth control are more freely available saw the biggest decreases in births: about 5% in California, Maryland, Nevada and New Mexico.

“Hispanic women as a group are facing more challenges in accessing reproductive care, including both contraception and abortion,” Gregory said in a university report earlier this year. “Unplanned births often directly impact women’s workforce participation and negatively affect the income levels of their families.”

Hispanic women on average have more children than Black or white women. Their fertility rates rose throughout much of the 1980s and 1990s, then fell in the late 2000s to near the same level as other groups. That’s because both abortion and more reliable birth control became more widely available, Gregory said.

The fact that some of the steepest drops were in heavily Hispanic states outside of Arizona and Texas suggests that Latina women are continuing a path toward smaller and delayed families typical of other groups.

Kentucky’s population shifted older in a decade. Here’s how and why it matters.

Most of the decline in California has been associated with fewer babies born to Hispanic women, especially immigrants, said Johnson, of the Public Policy Institute of California.

“California has a high share of Latinos compared to other states, and so fertility declines in that group have a huge effect on the overall decline in California,” he said. California was above replacement fertility as recently as 2008, he added, and would still be there if Hispanic fertility had not dropped. California is about 40% Hispanic, about the same as Texas and second only to New Mexico at 50%.

Birth rates also declined steeply in heavily Hispanic Nevada and New Mexico, with each dropping about 4% from 2022 to 2023. But Arizona, Florida and Texas, also in the top 10 states for Hispanic population share but faster-growing, saw relatively small drops of about 1%.

Texas banned almost all abortions after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. The state also requires parental consent for birth control, a rule that’s included federally funded family planning centers since a lower court ruling that same year.

Arizona also saw the number of abortions drop in 2022. After the high court’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision, an Arizona judge revived enforcement of a near-total ban on the procedure that was enacted in the Civil War era. Many clinics closed and never reopened.

Abortions in the state plummeted from more than 1,000 a month early in 2022 to 220 in July 2022, and never fully recovered, according to state records. The rate of abortions dropped 19% for the year. Births that year increased slightly, by 500, over 2021.

In Texas, Gregory’s research at the University of Houston research saw an effect on Hispanic births when an abortion ban took effect in 2021. Fertility rates rose 8% that year for Hispanic women 25 and older, according to the report.

Both Texas and Arizona also are growing quickly, making the smaller decreases in births harder to interpret, Arizona State Demographer Jim Chang noted. Chang declined comment on the effect of abortion accessibility on state birth rates.

Budget effects

Overall, the continuing fall in birth numbers could have significant effects on state budgets in the future. The slide augurs more enrollment declines for state-funded public schools already facing more dropouts since the pandemic.

Births decline in most states, continuing a long-term trend

“The decline we see in enrollment since COVID-19 is a bigger problem than just the decline in birth rates,” said Sofoklis Goulas, an economic studies fellow at the Brookings Institution. Rural schools and urban high schools have been particularly hard hit, according to a Brookings report Goulas authored this year.

“We don’t have a clear answer. We suspect a lot of people are doing home education or going to charter schools and private schools but we’re not sure,” Goulas told Stateline.

Still, states need to recognize declining births as an emerging factor in state budgets to avoid future budget shortfalls, said Jeff Chapman, a research director who monitors the trend at The Pew Charitable Trusts.

Nationally, births did increase slightly for women older than 40, indicating a continuing trend toward delayed parenthood, said William Frey, a demographer at Brookings.

“The last two post-pandemic years do not necessarily indicate longer-term trends,” Frey said. “Young adults are still getting used to a recovering economy, including childbearing.

This story is republished from Stateline, a sister publication of Kentucky Lantern and part of the nonprofit States Newsroom network.

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Southern states had most of the nation’s population growth

Tim Henderson — Tue, 26 Dec 2023 12:20:21 +0000

Workers apply brick to the facing of new homes in a new subdivision in Frisco, Texas, Thursday, Aug. 12, 2021. (AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez)

Southern states continued to get the lion’s share of new residents this year as Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Georgia and South Carolina added almost 1.2 million people among them. The South was the only region that drew net new residents from other states.

Meanwhile, the national population grew by 1.6 million people from births and immigrants, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates released last week.

South Carolina had the largest percentage increase between mid-2022 and mid-2023, a 1.7% increase of about 91,000 residents, most of it from people moving in from other states. The Summerville area, inland from Charleston, has been a magnet for movers, drawing hundreds of new residents each month, according to a Stateline analysis of change-of-address data from the U.S. Postal Service.

South Carolina also rose into the top five in terms of the number of new residents, as Arizona tumbled from that spot to No. 7, with growth of about 66,000 people.

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Despite booming populations in coastal areas, rural parts of South Carolina are still expected to decline 15%-30% over the next decade, the state predicts. Newcomers have helped offset an aging population that has seen more deaths than births, said Daniel Tompkins, a statistician at the state Revenue and Fiscal Affairs Office.

In Texas, the one-year increase of about 473,000 includes hundreds of thousands of people moving in from other states and countries as well as new births. The state is drawing a large number of movers to fast-growing suburbs, where newcomers tend to be younger than Texans in general and more likely to have a college degree, said State Demographer Lloyd Potter.

“Like so many others, work brought us here,” said Jason Hall, who recently moved to Georgetown, Texas, an Austin exurb north of Round Rock.

“There is much more opportunity here than where we were before, Las Vegas, and you don’t have the crazy housing prices of California,” said Hall, a surgical assistant whose wife works for an online retailer. He added that suburban Georgetown reminds him of the South Texas area where he lived after leaving the Army 20 years ago.

“Georgetown still has that Texas feel that Austin kind of lost,” Hall said.

Georgetown has had some of the largest numbers of people moving in, according to the postal data for the period covered by the census estimates — the year ending July 1.

With all the new people you need instant housing, but there’s going to be three cars in each of those driveways. It can take years for the infrastructure to catch up.

– Texas State Demographer Lloyd Potter

The destination list is dominated by Texas and Florida locales: in Texas, Georgetown as well as Katy and Conroe near Houston, and Aubrey and Prosper north of Dallas; in Florida, Port St. Lucie and Palm Bay on the East Coast and Wesley Chapel, north of Tampa.

Florida’s population boom, about 365,000 between mid-2022 and mid-2023, has been made up mostly of people 50 and older moving to the state looking toward downsizing and retirement, while Texas has drawn more working-age people.

In other states, Henderson, Nevada, and Queen Creek, Arizona, have drawn many new movers.

Growth in popular Texas suburbs has been so fast that roads and other infrastructure have been strained, said Potter, the state demographer.

“They’re building big apartment buildings and single-family houses, really just as fast as they can,” Potter said. “With all the new people you need instant housing, but there’s going to be three cars in each of those driveways. It can take years for the infrastructure to catch up.”

The newcomers are more likely to have college degrees than those already living in Texas, Potter said. The Lone Star State, like Florida, grew 1.6%.

In Florida, however, state officials have said growth will slow over the next decade as baby boomers age out of the 50-70 age range that feeds most moves to the state.

The state’s fastest-growing counties as of April, when the state makes its own population estimates, are in north and central Florida, where retirement communities are concentrated, said Richard Doty, a research demographer for the Bureau of Economic and Business Research at the University of Florida.

Population dropped in eight states, down from 19 last year: New York, California, Illinois, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Hawaii and West Virginia.

This story is republished from Stateline, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and donors as a 501c(3) public charity.?

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Residents of Midwest, Mountain West see biggest pay bump

Tim Henderson — Tue, 31 Oct 2023 09:40:03 +0000

Ukrainian immigrant Dmytro Haiman, pictured in Dickinson, N.D., is one of the international workers the state has recruited to work in its booming oil industry. North Dakota’s shale oil boom contributed to a nation-leading 11% boost in personal income over the past four years. (Jack Dura/The Associated Press)

Residents of some Midwestern and Mountain states gained the most income per capita during the past four years, a Stateline analysis shows, as competition for workers drove up wages in relatively affordable places to live.

With the COVID-19 pandemic now in the nation’s rearview mirror, Stateline’s analysis offers a more complete understanding of how some states’ residents benefitted economically — and others didn’t — as policy decisions and Americans’ choices shuffled state-by-state outcomes.

The oil and gas industry boosted the per capita incomes for residents of North and South Dakota. Mountain states such as Utah saw high earners moving in from California, Oregon and Texas.

Kentucky’s per capita income increased 4.6% from 2019 to 2023 to $54,321, but Kentucky is still a poor state, ranking 47th among the 50 states and District of Columbia.

States where inflation-adjusted income declined included Alaska, where oil drilling has been in long-term decline, as well as Georgia and Maryland.

In Kentucky, per capita income has increased 4.6% since 2019 to $54,321 — 47th lowest among the states and District of Columbia.

Inflation took the biggest bite out of paychecks in the West and South, with consumer prices rising about 20% in those regions between mid-2019 and mid-2023, according to U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis figures compiled for Stateline by the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center in Washington, D.C. Inflation was a little lower in the Midwest, about 19%, and about 16% in the Northeast.

Stateline’s analysis calculated gains in per capita personal incomes after regional inflation between the second quarter of 2019, before the pandemic, and the second quarter of 2023, the latest available from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Per capita personal income, which includes all kinds of income from wages to business income and pandemic support payments, often is used as a barometer of economic health for states.

Many of the states in the Mountain West, Midwest and New England that experienced large income increases have scenic or affordable areas that have attracted remote workers looking for a lower cost of living and proximity to recreation.

“Things changed fast. Now there’s competition for workers and upward pressure on wages, and people from Oregon and California are saying ’Hey I could live next to five national parks. This is an incredible place,’” said Shawn Teigen, president of the Utah Foundation, a nonprofit that monitors Mountain State trends.

Newcomers to Utah, for example, brought both more income and oftentimes smaller families than the longtime Mormon population, boosting per capita incomes, he noted. And competition for scarce service and manufacturing workers has forced employers to pay more.

“This used to be a place where we could bring businesses in and say, ‘You can pay minimum wage and people will take the jobs because it’s not expensive to live here,’” he said.

Inflation-adjusted per capita incomes in Utah have grown by about 8% since 2019. Incomes in Colorado, Maine, Montana and Nebraska also grew by roughly that much. Incomes in Arizona, Idaho and Missouri increased by about 7%.

But the greatest gains were in North Dakota and South Dakota, where inflation-adjusted incomes increased by 11% and 9%, respectively.

North Dakota’s per capita personal income rose to $73,414, giving it the 12th highest income in the country, up from 16th in 2019. The gains allowed it to leapfrog states including Illinois, Minnesota and Virginia.

Growth in North Dakota’s energy industry continues to roar ahead, with taxable sales and purchases by the industry up more than 50% in recent quarters compared with the previous year, according to state estimates through mid-2023.

Unemployment has remained below 3% — and in recent years it has stayed low even in winter months, when outdoor work used to stop in brutally cold weather, said Kevin Iverson, a demographer at the North Dakota State Data Center.

The major impediment now is finding more workers to hire, Iverson said.

“It is no longer surprising to see businesses spend their advertising dollars on recruiting workers instead of customers,” Iverson said. The state recently created an Office of Legal Immigration to help recruit workers from abroad and among work-authorized immigrants already in the United States.

Incomes didn’t grow as much in most of the Northeast, partly because low-wage service workers have fared better than the high earners who predominate in the region, said Lucy Dadayan, principal research associate at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. Some of the highest-income areas in the country, including Connecticut and the District of Columbia, were in the bottom 10 for income growth. New Jersey and New York weren’t far ahead.

Those states still have among the highest incomes, though. Connecticut fell to No. 3 for personal income per capita overall at $86,674, from No. 2 in 2019, behind Massachusetts at $88,197 and the District of Columbia at $100,971.

“Connecticut, New York and New Jersey have a higher share of high-income taxpayers, and the salaries of low-income workers increased far more in the pandemic,” Dadayan wrote in an email. “Moreover, some of the income for high-income workers is often dependent on the stock market performance, which declined in 2022.”

The knocks to personal incomes affected state revenues. In Connecticut, personal income tax revenue took a $1.3 billion hit in fiscal 2023, down nearly a third in one year and erasing gains since fiscal 2019, according to state comptroller records. Comptroller Sean Scanlon blamed the drop on 2022 stock market losses in his annual report to the governor.

However, Connecticut’s general fund revenues showed a surplus overall in fiscal 2023 because of strong gains in use and sales taxes as hospitality and tourism industries recovered. Democratic Gov. Ned Lamont signed a tax cut bill in June.

Both Alaska and North Dakota have economies driven by oil, but North Dakota’s shale boom is still on an upswing while Alaska’s production has been in decline since the 1980s, helping North Dakota rise to the top of income growth statistics while Alaska sunk to the bottom. Alaska’s per capita income dropped 2.4% after inflation over the past four years.

North Dakota landowners are seeing continued profits from oil leases on private land. Alaska’s oil, however, is largely on public land that has seen more cutbacks in drilling rights, said John Connaughton, professor of financial economics at the Belk College of Business at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

State-by-state income rises across the Midwest were “all over the map,” from North Dakota’s double-digit percentage increase to just 2% for Wisconsin and 3% for Kansas and Michigan, said Nina Mast, who studied the region’s wage trends in the pandemic in an October study for the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C.

The region as a whole suffered lower wage growth compared with other regions in the pandemic through 2022, threatening to increase inequality and hurt middle-class workers, who increasingly lack union representation, Mast said.

Michigan became the first state to repeal an anti-union “right to work” law in March, a step that could help empower workers there, Mast said. “It was a really historic step that could really have important effects for workers in the Midwest.”

This story is republished from Stateline, a sister publication to the Kentucky Lantern and part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: [email protected]. Follow Stateline on Facebook and Twitter.

Death rates for people under 40 have skyrocketed. Blame fentanyl.

Tim Henderson — Wed, 06 Sep 2023 09:50:44 +0000

Photos of young overdose victims on display at an overdose awareness event in Rockville, Maryland, in August. Accidental overdose has become a primary cause of deaths for people under 40. (Photo by Tim Henderson/Stateline)

A new Stateline analysis shows that U.S. residents under 40 were relatively unscathed by COVID-19 in the pandemic but fell victim to another killer: accidental drug overdose deaths.

Death rates in the age group were up by nearly a third in 2021 over 2018, and last year were still 21% higher.

COVID-19 was a small part of the increase, causing about 23,000 deaths total between 2018 and 2022 in the age group, which includes the millennial generation (born starting in the early 1980s), Generation Z (born starting in the late ’90s) and children. Vehicle accidents and suicide (about 96,000 each) and gun homicide (about 65,000) all took a cumulative toll from 2018 to 2022, according to a Stateline analysis of federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data.

Overdose deaths, however, took almost 177,000 lives in that time.

Accidental overdose became the No. 1 cause of death in 13 states for people under 40, overtaking suicide in nine states and vehicle accidents in five others; it’s now the top cause in 37 states, including Kentucky. The only other change was in Mississippi, where homicide became the main cause of death, overtaking car accidents. In 40 states and the District of Columbia, overdose was the biggest increase in deaths for young people.

States are responding to the skyrocketing death rates with “harm reduction” strategies that can include warning of the new danger of recreational drugs laced with deadly fentanyl, training and equipping people to counteract overdoses when they see them, and even considering controversial supervised drug use sites to keep addicts safer.

A “fourth great wave” of accidental overdose deaths driven by drugs spiked with powerful fentanyl is now washing over young America, said Daliah Heller, vice president of drug use initiatives at Vital Strategies, an international advocacy group that works on strengthening public health.

Prescription opioids led to one surge in drug dependency from 2000 to 2016, then when supply waned in response to crackdowns, users turned to heroin, synthetic opioids and finally fentanyl, which is 50 times more potent than heroin and easier to get in the pandemic, Heller said.

‘Very common’ experience

Jonathan Diehl of Silver Spring, Maryland, died in 2019 at age 28 after using heroin he likely did not know was spiked with fentanyl, said his mother, Cristina Rabadán-Diehl. Jonathan Diehl earned a degree in construction management and was starting a promising new job in home heating and air conditioning four days before he died, his mother said.

Cristina Rabadán-Diehl with a photo of her son, Jonathan Diehl, at an overdose awareness event in Rockville, Maryland. He died in 2019 after using fentanyl-laced heroin. (Photo by Tim Henderson/Stateline)

“I think Jonathan’s trajectory was very common,” said Rabadán-Diehl, who now works as an adviser on substance use disorders. “He started with opioid pills, and when the government started putting restrictions on prescriptions, he as well as millions and millions of Americans transitioned into the illegal market. And then fentanyl made its appearance.”

Now, a fresh wave of overdose deaths — different from the first three — is fed by fentanyl making its way into all kind of recreational drugs, and by pandemic isolation that led to more solitary drug use, Heller said.

“Somebody might think they’re getting a Xanax [for anxiety], or methamphetamine or cocaine,” Heller said. “They have no experience with opioids, it’s not what they’re expecting and now they have a much higher risk of overdose and death.”

Authorities generally classify overdose deaths as an accident or suicide based on individual investigations of the circumstances surrounding each death.

States struggling the most with deaths of young people, driven mostly by accidental overdoses, include New Mexico, which eclipsed West Virginia and Mississippi since 2018 to have the highest death rate in the nation for people under 40 — about 188 deaths per 100,000, up 43% since 2018.

Other states with high death rates for the age group include West Virginia (170 deaths per 100,000), Louisiana and Mississippi (164), and Alaska (163).

In Kentucky, the death rate for people under 40 was 142.3 per 100,000. Drug overdose was the leading cause of death among Kentuckians in this age group in 2018 and 2022. Among all age groups last year in Kentucky, fatal overdoses ticked down 5% from 2,250 deaths in 2021 to 2,135 in 2022, according to the state. It was the first decrease in overdose deaths since 2018.

In New Mexico, where accidental overdoses became the main cause of death for people under 40 in 2022, overtaking suicide and rising 90% to 394 deaths since 2018, the overdose problem has generally been concentrated in poverty-plagued rural areas such as Rio Arriba County on the Colorado border.

Democratic state Rep. Tara Lujan, who has relatives in that county, sponsored harm reduction legislation signed into law last year. It is similar to laws in many other states that include wide distribution of naloxone to reverse overdoses, legalized testing equipment for deadly additives like fentanyl, and good Samaritan laws that allow friends to report overdoses without legal consequences for their own drug use.

icole Quintero and Kelly Ryan of Love In The Trenches, an overdose awareness group, demonstrate how to reverse an overdose with Narcan nasal spray to students at Bowie State University in Bowie, Md. Tim Henderson/Stateline

Lujan hopes to reintroduce a bill that would create so-called overdose prevention centers or harm reduction centers where drugs can be used in a supervised and safe environment. The legislation died in committee this year after Republicans called the idea “state-sponsored drug dens.”

“It’s all issues that were in place before the pandemic, but the pandemic made everything completely off the rails,” Lujan said. “My committee meetings have been packed with family members saying, ‘We know they won’t quit on their own, but we don’t want them to die.’”

Only New York City has two such facilities in operation, run by advocates; the sites claim some success in reversing overdoses. But federal law enforcement authorities are threatening to shut them down without a specific state mandate, since otherwise they fall under a federal law banning operations that allow illegal drug use on-site.

In California, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom last year vetoed legislation that would have allowed jurisdictions to open safe injection sites, saying they “could induce a world of unintended consequences” in cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco and Oakland.

“Worsening drug consumption challenges in these areas is not a risk we can take,” Newsom wrote in a veto message.

Rhode Island is the only state so far to pass legislation allowing supervised drug-use sites as a pilot project, in 2021, but has yet to open any centers. New legislation introduced this year would push the expiration of the pilot project from 2024 to 2026.

Bills on the same topic of supervised drug-use sites were under consideration this year in Colorado, Illinois and New York but did not pass.

In a sign of the impact on young people, a Massachusetts bill would have required all state university dorm assistants to have naloxone training to reverse overdoses, but it stalled.

New Hampshire is one of several states experimenting with vans that go to known drug-use locations and offer overdose prevention supplies and advice.

Death rate disparities

The lowest death rates for young people in 2022 were in Hawaii (78 deaths per 100,000), Massachusetts and Rhode Island (79), and Utah and New Jersey (80). Massachusetts and New Jersey were the only states to see decreases in overall deaths for people under 40 since 2018, and also had drops in overdose deaths, although overdose remained the No. 1 cause of death for young people in both states.

Nationally, accidental overdoses dominated the increase in deaths in residents under 40 across racial and urban-rural divides, but many disparities exist. The increase in young overdose death rates was 154% for Black Americans, 122% for Hispanic residents and 37% for white people, yet even for white residents they represented the largest increase.

The largest urban areas saw increases in overdose death rates of 70%, and rural areas 64% — the largest increases in both areas for any cause of death.

Across races and age groups overdose death rates are higher for men and slowed in 2017, but picked up again after 2018 and skyrocketed in the pandemic until 2021, according to a federal National Center for Health Statistics data brief published last year.

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: [email protected]. Follow Stateline on Facebook and Twitter.

A ‘she-cession’ no more: After COVID dip, women’s employment hits all-time high

Tim Henderson — Thu, 20 Jul 2023 09:50:34 +0000

Naomi Knowles participates in a training program for construction workers in Deerfield, Wisconsin. Women’s employment is at an all-time high, but fields such as construction and tech management remain male dominated. (Photo courtesy of Mustang Christie/Operation Fresh Start)

After fears of a “she-cession” during the pandemic, women have returned to the workforce at unprecedented rates.

Much of the gain reflects a boom in jobs traditionally held by women, including nursing and teaching.? Many good-paying jobs in fields such as construction and tech management are still dominated by men, a continuing challenge for states trying to even the playing field for women workers.

In June, the national share of employed women ages 25-54, considered prime working age, hit 75.3%, the highest recorded since the U.S. Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey started reporting the numbers in 1948. The share of women 25-54 working or looking for work also hit a new high of 77.8% in June, the third straight month it beat the previous record of 77.3% from 2000.

“It’s good news that women are finding jobs in this economy at a greater rate than they were previously,” said Elise Gould, a senior economist at the left-leaning think tank Economic Policy Institute. She noted that brisk hiring in health care and government has helped more women find jobs.

But there is still a gap between rates of men and women in the workforce overall in every state except Vermont. As of March 2022, the latest figures available, the largest gap is 18 percentage points in Arizona, where 89.6% of prime-age men have jobs compared with 71.4% of women. The smallest is in Maine, where 77.8% of men in that age range have jobs compared with 77.3% of women.

In Kentucky, 69.5% of women ages 25-54 are working, the fifth-lowest rate among the states. The rate for Kentucky men is 77.1% — a gap of 7.6 percentage points.

Mothers of small children lost work at three times the rate of fathers early in the pandemic as they struggled to supervise remote learning sessions. Even when schools and day cares reopened in person, they often closed down unexpectedly during outbreaks, drawing out employment woes for many working women with children. Combined with early pandemic job losses in tourism and hospitality, fields where many women hold jobs, women’s employment dipped as low as 63.4% in April 2020, the lowest since 1984.

For some women, getting back to the workforce after the pandemic slump in women’s employment is a relief, and in some cases hybrid work has created the flexibility they need to return to jobs.

“It really means a lot because apart from the feeling that you’re contributing to your family, which is so important in today’s world, there’s just more fulfillment as a person,” said Deepika Gosain of Fremont, California. She started work in April as a learning and development specialist at a surgical company, finding that hybrid work helped her return to the workforce after taking several years off to care for two small children.

Karen Arrigo-Hill of Los Angeles is looking for work again as a project manager in financial tech, a traditionally male-dominated field, after a break to care for small children. (Courtesy of Karen Arrigo-Hill)

Health care and education represented the biggest gains for women in the past year, between June 2022 and June 2023, comprising about 778,000 of the 2 million jobs added for women, according to a Stateline analysis. Government and hospitality jobs added another 727,000 jobs for women.

Jobs in construction and tech management remain stubbornly male dominated, however. Men are 96.5% of carpenters and nearly 74% of computer system managers, for example.

Karen Arrigo-Hill is looking for work in financial tech again after taking a break to raise small children. Like Gosain, she’s used the networking group Women Back to Work for tips on California jobs for women who have taken breaks from work. She also participates in an incubator program for underrepresented genders in tech, called In the Lab Product Management.

“The biggest thing I notice is all the support there is for the women who took a career break for caregiving and want to return to work in technology,” Arrigo-Hill said. “This process of returning is a long process, and it really helps.”

States such as California, Massachusetts and New York are working to get more women into male-dominated fields.

A Democratic-sponsored bill in the New York State Assembly calls for $500,000 in funding to get more women into high-wage jobs, including construction and some tech fields, where they make up less than 25% of workers.

Elsewhere in the region, the state-funded Massachusetts Commission on the Status of Women in June recommended passage of a legislative resolution saying that COVID-19 had an outsized effect on women, including on their jobs, and that “prejudices against gender and race have served to make it difficult for women to fill roles demanded by society and their professions.” In its annual report, the commission urged passage of bills that would provide more day care and improve pay transparency, which can lead to women earning higher salaries.

California has budgeted $30 million over the last two years to helping more women get jobs in construction, including grants for apprenticeships and child care.

“When we spoke with women in construction, they told us childcare costs were one of the biggest barriers to working in the trade,” said Katie?Hagen,?director of the state Department of Industrial Relations,?in a?statement.

In Wisconsin, using state, local and private funding, the Operation Fresh Start Build Academy is helping 21-year-old Naomi Knowles train for a career in construction. On a recent day she hung drywall in a home under construction in Deerfield.

“Being the only girl on a crew of all men, it feels like a lot of pressure,” Knowles said. “They expect you to be less than them. But I’ve proven them wrong. I love the people and I love the results — seeing this house go from studs to walls in here and siding. It’s amazing.”

Construction is an important field for women to get into because the pay can be good, there’s a labor shortage, and a college degree isn’t necessary, according to a forthcoming report by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research in Washington, D.C. Since the pandemic started, there are 126,000 more women working in construction for a total of 1.1 million, though women still make up only 14% of workers in the industry.

“The percentage is so low for women that it can easily send the message that this is clearly a sector just for men,” said Ariane Hegewisch, the group’s program director for employment and earnings. The U.S. Commerce Department is also pushing to double the number of women in construction as federally funded infrastructure projects ramp up.

Vermont is the only state where prime-age women work at a greater rate than men: 83% compared with 81% for men. Vermont may be unique because of its mix of jobs, said Mathew Barewicz, the state’s labor market information director. “Vermont has a diverse industry composition without an overreliance on typically male-dominated industries [like] mining, transportation, finance.”

Progress in bringing more women to the workplace is likely to continue, said Beth Almeida, a senior fellow at the progressive Center for American Progress think tank specializing in women’s economic security.

“This generation of women ages 25-54 have more college degrees than any other generation of women, and having college degrees is a very strong predictor of labor force attachment,” Almeida said.

“They’ve made a substantial financial investment in their future. But their employment is very impacted by caregiving, because women have a greater responsibility when it comes to family.”

This story is republished from Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott Greenberger for questions: [email protected]. Follow Stateline on Facebook and Twitter.

Despite pandemic pay boost, low-wage workers still can’t afford basic needs

Tim Henderson — Wed, 12 Jul 2023 10:05:08 +0000

A waiter serves drinks outside a restaurant in July 2020 in New York City. Low-wage workers in many states saw a big boost in their pay during the COVID-19 pandemic, between 2019 and 2022. (Jeenah Moon/Getty Images)

Employers grappling with a nationwide labor shortage gave the largest pay increases to low-wage workers between 2019 and last year.

But even so, many of those workers — more than 40% of all U.S. households, by one estimate — are struggling to cover the inflated costs of basic expenses.

In the past several years, businesses such as bars and restaurants have engaged in bidding wars for scarce workers. In 28 states, people working in food preparation and service jobs had the biggest pay bumps: Waiters and waitresses made at least 50% more in New Jersey, Wisconsin and Utah, according to a Stateline analysis of new federal wage data. There were similar spikes for bartenders in Utah, Arizona and Kentucky.

Many states have raised minimum wages in recent years, with more increases coming this year. But low-wage workers got significant raises even in states that use the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.

Median pay for food workers such as cooks and waiters increased 33% in Kansas and 31% in Idaho, faster than any other job category in those states. In Kentucky and Mississippi, transportation workers got an increase of 22%, outpacing all other categories of workers. The minimum wage is $7.25 in all of those states.

Farmworkers in California got bigger raises, by percentage, than computer professionals. The hourly pay for computer and math jobs rose 20% to $61.87, enough to beat the 14.1% inflation rate for that time frame.

But pay for California farmworkers jumped 30% to a median of $16.12.

The federal data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, called the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, measures hourly wages by state and job for May of the previous year. The 2022 data was released in April.

Nationwide, gains in pay for low-wage jobs have reached historic proportions, according to an Economic Policy Institute report in March. Compensation for the lowest-paid jobs rose 9% between 2019 and 2022, adjusted for inflation. That’s much higher than the 4.9% for high-wage jobs and 2.4% for middle-wage jobs. And it was the biggest bounce for low-wage workers since at least 1979, according to the report.

“The labor market is stronger now, particularly for workers who are historically disadvantaged because of their relative scarcity,” said Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute and lead author of the March report.

“Employers are scrambling to get them hired back,” she said. “They can look across the street and see better wages and bonuses.”

However, research from the Economic Policy Institute and other groups shows a continuation of the decades long trend of low-wage workers falling behind as rising costs outpace their incomes.

Despite the recent gains, low-wage workers have faced stagnant wages for decades. Their costs for basics such as housing and health care have risen even faster than inflation, according to?a report from United for ALICE, a project led by the United Way of Northern New Jersey.?

The effects are significant: The typical retail sales worker, the most common job in the country, lost $26,000 in buying power between 2007 and 2022, according to the report.

“You see people getting paid a decent wage and then you realize it’s really expensive to live there. It’s a big factor even with the higher pay recently for people in low-wage jobs,” said Stephanie Hoopes, director of the ALICE team that compiled the statistics as a more realistic yardstick of families’ economic well-being.

Nationally, 41% of households were either in poverty or unable to afford basic needs in 2021, according to the United for ALICE report. The share of households in that situation ranges from 32% in Alaska to 52% in Mississippi.

Cost of living

Cost of living plays a big part in hourly pay. Statewide median pay ranged from $17.36 in Mississippi, which also has the lowest cost of living, to $28.10 in Massachusetts, which is one of the most expensive states. Cost of living is measured as of 2021 by the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis, which shows the highest cost of living is in Hawaii, where median pay was $23.35 last year.

Some Midwestern states saw big pay increases for their most common jobs. For example, manual laborers in Indiana and Illinois had median pay increases of 24% and 25%, though those workers still make less than $18 per hour. In Pennsylvania, where there are more manual laborers than any other category except home health aides, median pay increased 22% but the median is still less than $18 per hour.

Pay like that is a step up from fast food and retail jobs for a high school graduate, but not enough to pay for housing for a family in Indiana, said Rachel Blakeman, director of Purdue University’s Community Research Institute in Fort Wayne. And, she said, such jobs are always subject to layoffs and replacement by new technology.

“In Indiana, we’re kind of stuck at $17 an hour. There’s an idea that we need workers to fill the factories and we’re going to do that with the kids,” Blakeman said, adding that there should be more support for Midwestern high school students who want to go to college or learn professional trades.

“Most of our students have to pay for college. It’s not a free endeavor. But we forget there’s also a cost to not going to college,” Blakeman said.

In Alabama, personal care workers had the biggest hourly pay increase, up 19% to a median $12.38 an hour. The personal care category includes hairdressers, whose pay was up 39% to a median $13.98, and recreation workers, up 25% to $12.63.

One state where higher-wage workers fared better than low-wage ones was Massachusetts, where a biotech boom gave the biggest wage bump to science professionals, whose pay rose 24% to $47.14 an hour.

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott Greenberger for questions: [email protected]. Follow Stateline on Facebook and Twitter.

Kentucky births increased last year bucking national trend

Tim Henderson — Tue, 30 May 2023 09:40:58 +0000

Parents walk with their 7-year-old and 10-week-old sons in June of 2020 in Stamford, Conn. Births increased last year by 262 in Kentucky but most states saw fewer babies in 2022. (John Moore/Getty Images)

Fast-growing Texas and Florida had the biggest increases in the number of births last year, while a dozen other states — half of them in the South, including Kentucky — continued to rebound from pandemic lows.

In the United States as a whole, however, the number of births has plateaued after a modest increase following the worst of the pandemic, according to preliminary data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Births increased in only 15 states from 2021 to 2022, compared with growth in 43 states between 2020 and 2021. More detailed statistics, which could shift slightly, are due for release June 1.

Overall, the new data shows the continuation of a long-term trend toward fewer births in the United States, said Phillip Levine, an economics professor at Wellesley College who studies birth trends. Births were down more than 650,000 or 15% over the past 15 years.

“We’re back where we started before COVID hit,” Levine said. “Births are still declining, albeit perhaps at a slower pace. There certainly is no reason to stop sounding the sirens on the long-term decline in births in the United States.”

Without an increase in immigration, that trend could mean an older population, a smaller workforce and?diminished economic productivity. That’s true even in Texas, where second-generation immigrants and women under 30 in general are increasingly postponing parenthood.

(Photo by Araya Diaz/Getty Images for Carter’s Kids)

Low fertility rates, expensive housing mean fewer children in most states

The declines mostly are a reflection of historically low fertility rates, which have been below the replacement rate of two children per woman since 2010.

But in the 35 states that experienced declines, high housing prices also are a factor.

In California, jobs pay well but the state’s housing shortage has sent prices beyond the means of young families, said Hans Johnson, a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonpartisan think tank.