Population Decrease in US Counties

In quarter of U.S. counties, deaths outnumbering births, By Hope Yen and John Raby (AP), February 23, 2011, Las Vegas Review-Journal: “In America’s once-thriving coal country, 87-year-old Ed Shepard laments a prosperous era gone by, when shoppers lined the streets and government lent a helping hand. Now, here as in one-fourth of all U.S. counties, West Virginia’s graying residents are slowly dying off. Hit by an aging population and a poor economy, a near-record number of U.S. counties are experiencing more deaths than births in their communities, a phenomenon demographers call ‘natural decrease.’ Years in the making, the problem is spreading amid a job slump and a push by Republicans in Congress to downsize government and federal spending…”