Three hundred million strong

According to demographers, the population of the United States reached 300 million today. (That’s a fuzzy number, plus/minus a few weeks or even a month, but as William Frey, Brookings Institute analyst, said last night on NPR’s All Things Considered, you might as well pick a date, since we’ll never know for sure.)

The U.S. population reached 100 million in 1915, 200 million in 1967, and 250 million in 1990.

The U.S. Census Bureau reports, with tremendous precision, that at 12:00 GMT today, the U.S. population was 300,000,073, and the world population was 6,550,965,951. Every minute, it estimates, 252 people are born and 105 die.