Pack the Conestoga wagon with the chickens and the chilluns, Millie – we’re heading for the hills of…?

There can’t possibly be any reasons for this

— garbage.G H O S T⚡️ (@cocainemichelle) September 15, 2023

Well…anywhere but this woke Hellhole.

More people left Oregon than moved into the state in 2022, a reversal of growth trends that had endured since the 1980s.

The new U.S. Census Bureau numbers mark the first time Oregon saw more people leaving than arriving since a housing crash in the early ‘80s caused a sharp recession in the state.

Really? You think it was all COVID doing it? Read your own words here, Oregonian.

…Today’s population decline comes in the wake of the COVID-19 recession, which upended the workforce as remote work introduced people to the possibility of working from anywhere. Portland was among the urban centers that saw unusually large flows of residents leaving during this time. While many cities, like Seattle and Fort Worth, saw reversals in population losses after the first full year of the pandemic, Portland continued to shed residents and was among the fastest shrinking big cities in 2022.

Okay, Jan. You’re right. COVID chased all people out of Portland, NEVER TO RETURN. Couldn’t possibly have been anything else.

I mean, back as far as 2021, people were getting tired of “COVID” ruining life in downtown Portland.

After a year of protests, Portland residents have waning patience for antifa

Rose City Antifa is one of the nation’s oldest active antifa groups. Members rarely give interviews, but two who say they are part of antifa agreed to speak to “Nightline” as the situation in their city of Portland, Oregon, has become a prolonged and destructive stalemate.

Rose City Antifa members “Milo” and “Ace” use pseudonyms and they asked that their faces and voices be obscured for this report.

“The use of violence is a tactic of how we keep our communities safe,” Milo said.

Oh, I misspoke. It wasn’t COVID at all. It was out of control alt-right types, judging by unbiased Google results searching for “portland antifa violence.” All I see is “alt-right/Proud Boy clashes” with those nice masked folks protecting the city with violence – keeping it “safe” as it were. Gracious. Probably why David was reporting last week on Nike closing their flagship downtown store – all the alt-righters and work-from home-types just didn’t shop downtown like they used to, and when they did, they hassled the stalwart Antifa patriots protecting Portland.

I’m sure that’s it and, yeah – one can only take so much right wing and COVID nonsense.

I would argue the first three paragraphs of this article are an excellent illustration of what’s wrong with Oregon: they have constructed their own fantasy world to live in. A few people are just now beginning to rouse themselves from their cult induced stupor, and when they wake up, they are realizing they don’t like what they’ve done very much. When they see chaos and death and ugliness, and nonsensical regulations and restrictions, they react negatively. Often forgetting they are the very ones who brought this on themselves.

The problem fixing things is they are surrounded by the cult and those beliefs are enshrined into law thanks to elected and indulged cult leaders – witness John’s story on Portland banning open drug use which might be unconstitutional in Oregon – so there’s really no recourse but to leave.

The trend has accelerated to the entire state now, but just a year or two ago, Portland was already seeing a flight of direly needed big income assets out of the city to surrounding counties or out of state entirely.

Those who’ve moved away from Portland in recent years for greener pastures — with affordable housing or lower crime rates — have left a large dent financially.

Driving the news: Migration out of Multnomah County between 2020 and 2021 caused a $1.1 billion drop in adjusted gross income, according to a new analysis of tax data from the nonpartisan Economic Innovation Group.

Why it matters: Portland depends on residents’ incomes to support the local housing market, retail sales and the tax base.

• Multnomah County depends on high earners specifically for the preschool for all tax, and the tri-county Metro government for the homeless services tax, both passed in 2020.

The willful blindness regarding root causes for the state’s decreasing population was on display in an Oregon Public Broadcasting interview at the beginning of this year. Alarm bells were already sounding about the population outflow, worry what the completed 2022 figures would show when they came in, what it portended for the state’s future, and why it was happening. OPB had on Josh Lehner, a state economist, to try to explain some of the trends.

Yet, when Lehner was hit with a direct question containing an anecdote from someone leaving the state? His answer completely ignores the elephant in the room and quickly transitions to “jobs and housing” issues are the problem, not “bad policies/homelessness and crime.”

They’re never getting anywhere at this rate except lonely when everyone who can leaves.

The latest federal census numbers show Oregon’s population is shrinking for the first time in decades. And it’s losing residents at the sixth fastest rate. Calculating these estimates is not an exact science, says Josh Lehner, with the Oregon Office of Economic Analysis. He says numbers from the Portland State University Population Research Center indicate a slowing of growth in the state, but also show a drop in the Portland metro area. Lehner says however you look at it, the implications for state revenues are serious. He joins to explain these numbers and what it could mean if Oregon’s population doesn’t rebound.

… Miller: Heath Haywood sent us this in an email: ‘Maybe instead of looking at what will happen, should the state not rebound in population, the economists should look at the cause of the decline. Bad policies and high taxes, with extreme high living costs with low wages will drive out even the most dedicated Oregonians. I myself, along with my three grown children, have decided to leave as well. We are a small business that employs 20. We’re closing shop and leaving. The state will lose my trucking company’s tax revenue as well as the population loss of future generations of my family.’

Obviously this is just one person’s story, and I’ve seen other similarly anecdotal takes as well. Do you have a sense right now for the kinds of personal reasons that people are leaving?

Lehner: Moving is, to your point, a very personal thing. There’s a lot that goes into it. When you look at surveys, they tend to ask, ‘What is the number one reason why you moved?’ And the answers almost always are these big picture things like jobs and housing: ‘I need to move for work’ or ‘I’m moving in search of work.’ That’s always number one when you look at the traditional data that we have. Housing is number two, and then family would be number three. That’s an easy thing to discuss.

What doesn’t show up would be some of those softer measures or things that kind of impact our psyche or the way we feel about things, whether that’s the increase in the visibleness of our homeless neighbors or whether it is the taxes or whether it is the crime. Fill in whatever you want to put in that place. That doesn’t show up on these surveys, at least the traditional ones, so it’s really hard to kind of gauge those things. But even if we focus just on jobs, housing and family, we can still tell a coherent story for slower growth. Just maybe not necessarily outright decline.

Neither interviewer nor state flack are willing to touch the third rail of “BAD POLICIES” because you hit at the collective.

The collective is beginning to collapse under the weight of “bad policies.”

…Nearly 158,000 people packed up and left in 2022, which is roughly 33,000 more people leaving than the year before, census data shows. Meanwhile, Oregon saw about 128,000 newcomers from other states.

The exodus spanned all race and ethnic groups that showed any statistically significant migration.

The numbers also showed that Oregon lost residents across nearly all age groups in 2022, but saw an uptick in net out-migration among children and adults between the ages of 35 and 55. That suggests many families moved away.

Do they detox when they leave?

If they get as far as my state, I sure hope to hell they do. But so far, a fair amount of the outflow has been to Washington state, California, and Colorado, where the uber Leftist refugees are welcome and feel somewhat ideologically at home after the trauma of decoupling. Plus, they can’t do too much damage, as those states are already lost Lefty causes.

It’s when those collapse, and they start packing up the wagons again?

That’s when we have to be ready at the FL state line with deprogrammers.