One Million More

(A version of this post originally appeared on The Progressive Pulse, an NC blog.)

One million. That is the number of people that North Carolina has gained since 2000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Over an eight-year period (2000-2007), the state's population grew by 13 percent, going from eight to nine million.

Two factors drive population growth: natural increase (the difference between births and deaths) and migration (the difference between the number of people moving into a place and the number moving away). Migration may be further subdivided into international moves and domestic moves.

Since 2000, the main driver of North Carolina's population increase has been domestic in-migration, meaning that more people from other parts of the U.S. have moved into the Old North State than have moved away. Between 2000 and 2007, about 491,000 more people moved to North Carolina from other states than moved out. The next driver was natural increase (+353,000) followed by international migration (+189,000).

The addition of one million people to the state's population has driven the need for improved and expanded investments ranging from more spots in public schools to better transportation systems to improved public health and human services. Yet the state continues to provide, operate and finance such investments on the basis of models developed in the 1930s and 1940s, a time when the state was much smaller and very different.

If North Carolina is to provide the services that a growing population needs and demands, state leaders must rethink and modernize many of the structures and systems upon which the state relies. And as Meg Gray and Elaine Mejia of the NC Budget and Tax Center have argued, the foundation to that response must be meaningful tax modernization that fairly and adequately generates the revenues needed to fund vital public investments.