See US adult cigarette smoking rate hits new all-time low by Mike Stobbe of the Associated Press. Excerpts:
"In the mid-1960s, 42% of U.S. adults were smokers. The rate has been gradually dropping for decades, due to cigarette taxes, tobacco product price hikes, smoking bans and changes in the social acceptability of lighting up in public.
Last year, the percentage of adult smokers dropped to about 11%, down from about 12.5% in 2020 and 2021. The survey findings sometimes are revised after further analysis, and CDC is expected to release final 2021 data soon.
E-cigarette use rose to nearly 6% last year, from about 4.5% the year before, according to survey data."
See Participation Trophies’ Are a Fake Crisis. Here’s the Real Problem for Youth Sports. by Jason Gay of the WSJ. Excerpts:
"Numbers have been dropping for a while, both pre- and postpandemic. According to the Aspen Institute’s Project Play, which monitors data from the Sports & Fitness Industry Association, the percentage of children aged 6-12 who regularly played a team sport dropped from 45% in 2008 to 37% in 2021. That drop was under way well before Covid—participation fell to 38% in 2019, the year before the pandemic."
See What Drives Political Polarization by William A. Galston of the WSJ. Excerpts:
"In the close 1976 election between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, 20 states were decided by margins of less than 5 percentage points. By 2000, when Al Gore and George W. Bush faced off in another close election, only 12 states ended up this category. That number fell to 11 in 2016 and eight in 2020. During this period, few states became more competitive. Instead, most red states became redder, and blue states bluer, while many swing states shifted decisively toward one or the other party.
County lines are nearly as stable as state borders, and polarizing shifts within counties are similarly pronounced. As recently as 1992, 38% of voters lived in counties that gave winning margins of at least 20 points to Democrats or Republicans. By 2016 the share of these voters had risen to 60%, and this trend appears to have continued in 2020.
Against this backdrop, it should come as no surprise that the number of competitive congressional districts has declined sharply. In 1999, according to Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman, 164 seats were within 5 points of the nearly even national partisan divide. That number has since been cut in half. The number of seats that remain competitive in every election—what Cook calls “hyper-swing seats”—has fallen during this period by 58%, from 107 to 45. In more than 80% of districts, the outcome is for all practical purposes determined in the dominant party’s primary election, typically low-turnout affairs dominated by the most committed voters."
"Cornell’s Suzanne Mettler and Trevor Brown show that as recently as three decades ago, rural and urban voting patterns in presidential elections closely tracked each other. In 1996 Bob Dole’s share of the rural vote was only 3 points higher than his urban share, even though he was Republican from Kansas. In 2020 Donald Trump’s gap was 21 points. He received 64% of the rural vote and 43% of the urban vote."
"the urban-rural gap between the parties widened to 18 points in the South, but it expanded even more in the Midwest (22 points) and the West (20 points), with the Northeast not far behind at 15 points."
"Since the 1980s, manufacturing has been about twice as important for rural areas as for their urban counterparts. The decline of manufacturing jobs since 2000 has hit rural areas especially hard. Many small towns depended heavily on single manufacturing plants, whose closure sent many of them in a downward spiral that proved hard to reverse.
In 1970, the education gap between rural and urban areas was modest. Today, 35% of urban residents have at least a bachelor’s degree, compared with 21% for rural Americans. This helps explain why urban areas were more able to take advantage of the expanding information economy. An incredible 94% of the nation’s job growth since 2000 has occurred in urban counties, while almost half of their rural counterparts have suffered net job losses during the same period. Similarly, since the turn of the century, the population of urban counties has risen at more than twice the rate of rural counties, 41% of which have experienced population losses."
See The Right Amount of Cards, Cash and ID to Carry in Your Wallet by Oyin Adedoyin of the WSJ. Excerpts:
"Four in 10 Americans say none of their purchases in a typical week are paid for using cash, according to a 2022 survey from the Pew Research Center. That is up from 29% in 2018 and 24% in 2015, reflecting a trend accelerated by the pandemic. Plastic is getting displaced, too: 59% of Americans said they increased their use of digital payment methods last year, according to Mastercard’s New Payments Index."See Antisemitic Incidents Rise to New High, Report Says by Joseph De Avila of the WSJ. Excerpts:
"There were 3,697 antisemitic incidents in the U.S. last year, the most since the Anti-Defamation League started keeping records in 1979.
Antisemitic incidents rose 36% in 2022 from the previous year"
"In 2021, there were 2,717 occurrences, then the highest figure on record,"
"The ADL said it counts both criminal and noncriminal events of harassment, vandalism and assault where victims are targeted due to their Jewish identity as antisemitic incidents."
"The FBI reported there were 9,065 hate crimes in 2021, a 12% increase from the previous year. There were 817 incidents of anti-Jewish hate crimes in 2021, up 20% from the previous year, according to the FBI.
There were 1,107 anti-Black hate crimes in 2021, an increase of 27% from the previous year, according to the FBI data. Anti-Asian hate crimes more than doubled, to 746. Hate crimes targeting gay men rose 41% to 984."
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