Monday was a pretty special day here on the old home planet. Time zone by time zone, the world greeted the real New Millennium. The genuine dawn of the 21st century swept relentlessly westward, engulfing mankind in a tidal wave of peace and brotherhood unlike anything since maybe last New Year’s Eve. The music, the singing, the pealing of bells all combined in a universal harmony, a veritable chorus of cherubim and seraphim sounding the official all-clear to convert that Y2K Armageddon Bunker into a rec room.

Here in Maine, it was especially special. For, in addition to the above, it was the Day the Snack Tax Died. Yep, the repeal of the despised levy took effect. The jackboot of tyranny and sound nutrition was lifted from the public windpipe. Fetters and chains took a hike. Potato chips and Cheez Doodles were (as the Founding Fathers no doubt would have wanted it had chips and doodles been around when they were drawing up a list of unalienable rights) unalienably untaxed.

The cost to the state treasury is a mere $15 million which – even at a time when the state faces a shortfall of more than $200 million and property and income taxes and heating oil and college tuition and a lot of other stuff is too high – seems like money awfully well spent. Bon appetit.

So leave it to the news media to spoil the fun. The very next day, Tuesday, the same old news was back about people being mean to each other. That universal harmony was sounding like a rather loud and unpleasant argument between the Backstreet Boys and the Dixie Chicks. And it turns out snacks aren’t really cheaper.

Proof was plastered across the front page of The New York Times, a story about the food industry practice known as weight-out. That’s when manufacturers keep the price the same but make the packages smaller. You’ve seen it before, the shrunken candy bars, the 13-ounce pound of coffee, but now it’s the munchies. A $3.29 bag of Tostitos still costs $3.29; it just weighs 13.5 ounces instead of 14.5. For the same $2.99 as before, you now get 7.5-percent fewer Lay’s potato chips. Cracker Jack remains 99 cents, there’s just 6.7 percent less of it.

Actually, this current outbreak of downsizing isn’t limited to junk food. The six-gallon bottle of Poland Spring water is a new, improved and more profitable five. All major brands of disposable diapers have cut back the count of their jumbo packs by an average of 13 percent – company officials assert that the packs still contain enough diapers to get a reasonably frugal baby through a week.

But most of the recent weight-out is occurring in the snack-food business. The explanation offered by the industry is that shareholders demand higher profits and consumers don’t want to pay higher prices so the way to make everybody happy is to make consumers pay higher prices without them knowing about it. Snack-makers also suggest that, since weight-out can significantly reduce the tonnage of ingested cholesterol, there actually is a substantial public-health benefit. Plus, the lighter grocery bags ease back strain and the act of calculating the price per pound of something sold in 13.5-ounce bags develops mental acuity. What the smaller disposable-diaper counts will do for national self-restraint and continence as today’s American baby grows to adulthood can only be good.

When applied to something as frivolous as junk food there is a certain delightfully goofy Alice in Wonderland aspect to the idea that less is more or, in this case, the same or, in any case, anything other than less. Sometimes, in matters more serious, like Maine’s stagnant population, more actually can be less.

The first of the Census 2000 numbers were released just a few days before the new year and the early returns aren’t surprising or, for Maine, encouraging. During the last 10 years, the national population increased by 13 percent to some 281 million. Maine’s went up 3.8 percent, the fifth lowest increase in the country, an addition of a measly 47,000 people that doesn’t even let us round up from 1.2 million. Worse still, although the analysis below the state level won’t be published until March or April, there is no reason to doubt the Census Bureau’s longstanding projection that the population of Northern Maine counties is rapidly moving south. Maine isn’t growing. It’s just shifting.

The problem is that Maine government has been behaving as though it is growing. The constant drumbeat from various state agencies about combating sprawl suggests to the public that Maine is about to be cheek-to-jowl with Mainers the way Nevada (66 percent growth) and Arizona (40 percent) are with Nevadans and Arizonans. Fact is, Maine isn’t even keeping up with South Dakota and its 8.5 percent increase in South Dakotans.

This is a serious problem because economic experts have made it perfectly clear that the greatest impediment to prosperity in Northern Maine is its sheer lack of people, the critical mass needed to provide a work force attractive to new or expanding businesses. Just a couple of years ago, for example, an economist from Taiwan visiting the region was asked what Northern Maine needed most to thrive. His immediate answer – 100,000 more people.

In some states, sprawl is a growth issue. Here, it’s a neglect issue. northern Mainers aren’t moving to southern Maine for the climate, they’re moving because their jobs are going away, their schools are falling behind and their roads are lousy. Now they find out the $15 million that could have been used to help fix some of those problems doesn’t even buy a full bag of potato chips and that the issue that has consumed so much of the state’s attention doesn’t have the substance of a Cheez Doodle.

Bruce Kyle is the assistant editorial page editor for the Bangor Daily News.