CENSUS REVEALS INTERESTING DATA ABOUT LOCAL HOUSEHOLDS

Cape Girardeau County has approximately 23,800 households with 61,633 people. 49,386 are 15 years and over. Of those, 27% (13,330) have never been married (most 15 to 24 years of age). 27,936 (56.6%) are now married. 614 (1.2%) are married but separated. 3,765 people are widowed (7.6%). Of these 560 are males and 3,205 are females. This is the major gender difference reflected in the total county population of 29,598 males (48%) and 32,035 females (52%).

3,741 people (7.6%) are divorced with 1522 being males and 2,219 being females.

In the county 94% of the population is white while 6% is non-white (in the city of Cape that's 91% and 9%).

About 60% of the households have children under 18 while 40% do not.

There are 16,158 families in Cape with an average of 3.02 persons per family and 63% of the homes are owner occupied. 7% of the housedholds are headed up by single parents.

Census Data 1991 -

Cape County

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Although Cuban men are legally required to help with housework, the U.N.'s International Labor Organization says that 82% of all women in Havana, and 96% of all rural Cuban women, have sole responsibility for domestic chores.

It's easier to pass a law than to get the politically correct results some want.

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America Won't Be

Moody For Long

We are in a golden age. Like most such eras, the luster will be more apparent to historians than to those who live through it.

If 12 years ago a pundit had prophesied what has actually played out over the past 12 years, he would have been pilloried for puffing too much of what Governor Clinton claims he didn't inhale. No one then would have believed that we were on the eve of our longest peacetime expansion, where our growth alone would be greater than the size of the entire German economy; that the U.S. would best Japan in the critical technology areas of computers, software, digital screens and fiber optics; that inflation would drop from 15% to 3%; that interest rates would fall from a high of 21.5% to 6%; that around 20 million new jobs would be created, including a record number of high-paying ones; that we would surpass Japan and Germany in exports; that our share of worldwide manufacturing output would go up for the first time in 40 years; that this expansion would be followed not by depression but by a mild recession; that overseas Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Bulgaria would throw off communist regimes with no reaction from Moscow; that Germany would reunite under a democratic government and remain in NATO; that Moscow would withdraw in humiliation from Afghanistan; that the Soviet Union itself would cease to exist, breaking up into 15 pieces relatively peacefully; that we would fight a ground war against a formidably armed Mideast foe and win within 100 hours; and that, finally, after all of his, the American people would be in a funk.

We are suffering the social equivalent of postpartum blues, a feeling exacerbated by a downbeat media.

We have had down moods before: the 1890s, the early 1930s, the late 1960s, the late 1970s. But while we no longer have unshakable faith in progress, we remain a "can-do" people. Our optimism will reassert itself.

Our golden age will be symbolized by the microchip; it is extending the reach of the human brain the way machines extended the reach of human muscle during the Industrial Revolution. The way we live, the way we do business, will be enormously, beneficially transformed. In 2017, when we celebrate Forbes' 100th anniversary, our standard of living will be infinitely richer, more varied than it is today.

Politically, we are on the eve of a new Progressive Era of reform: free markets for health care finance; choice of schools; a flat tax; term limits for Congress; rationality again in our legal system; sound money and private, portable pensions (including Social Security). Thanks to fiber optics and interactive TV, our homes will become universities; culture and individualism will flower.

But don't get too carried away. Utopia is for the next life, not this one. We face ferocious fights on value issues. We are already seeing this with abortion. Political passions will also be aroused in other areas; child rearing, sex, crime, welfare, schools, individual responsibility for individual acts. The media and cultural "elites" ain't seen nothin' yet.

We are also about to witness a great spiritual revival. One impetus: aging baby boomers looking for greater meaning in their lives. Another: realization that fast-paced technological changes make a sound moral compass imperative to responding responsibly to these miracles. Fire gives us heat. It also gave us Auschwitz.

This revival won't be entirely religious. Senator Gore's bestselling book touts environmentalism less as a series of problems to be practically solved than as something spiritual, transcendental: Economies are expanding at the expense of pillaging Mother Earth, ultimately threatening life itself. Ironically, Gore's the-end-is-coming environmentalism comes just at the time that our relative dependence on raw materials--oil, copper iron--is eroding.More and more the raw material for wealth is information; fiber optics are our railroads and highways; software, our oil; human innovation, our gold.

Possible downers? Communism has lost, but democracy has not won. Yet many are tempted to turn their backs on the world and retreat into 1920s-style isolationism. Russia begs for our guidance in making the transition to free markets and democracy, and we respond by telling Russia to take its problems to the IMF. If we flub our enormous opportunities, we can easily create conditions dangerous to our own safety, just as we did in the Twenties and Thirties.

Another downer: idiotic economic policies such as those being practiced by Germany and proposed here at home by protectionists.

Progress doesn't come without price. Take the automobile. It has given millions of people unprecedented individualism and mobility, fabulously raising our standard of living. But more Americans have died on our highways than in all our wars.

Can we continue to adjust to the disruptions of progress? We will. But many fearful, unfulfilled people will fight a` la Al Gore to hobble scientific research and development and destroy and entrepreneurial capitalism.

If we could see the future, we would be absolutely astonished. As we make it happen, we will be much less impressed. History hasn't stopped and never will.

Malcolm S. Forbes, Jr.

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