h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Every ten years the government counts everybody to see who is where.
on 21 December at 11AM EST
they will be revealing some of what they learned.
details on webcast to be shown then.
http://www.visualwebcaster.com/event.asp?id=74725

After much talk about the Federal government doing this mainly to decide on apportionment of representatives in the government
it was revealed that the US Populationon in April 2010
was ....308,745,538.
and that among the 50 states, only Michigan lost population. this means that the Population in 2000 which was
9,938,444 has decreased 0.6 percent, giving a new figure of
9,878,813 people.
The main reason for this decline is jobs.
The various treaties of the US and other financial pressures have caused employers to move their manufacturing elsewhere.
As these employers cut their workforce, the State of Michigan attempted to provide a safety net with Unemployment Compensation checks.
These however are for a limited number of weeks
and a recent newspaper article (December 2010) stated that there were
166,000 people in Michigan no longer eligible for these payments.
It is expected that many of these would move to states where jobs were more plentiful.

The population shown in the article was a 1993 estimate.
Michigan's population grew from 2000 to 2006 and then began to go down ending below where it began the decade.