US South Economic Power in the Rise

[GURPS]

Next, enjoy this encouraging headline that Bloomberg ran last week:



Here are the first couple paragraphs:

Drive along the 240-mile stretch of the Atlantic coast from Charleston, South Carolina, through the grassy marsh land of southern Georgia and down into northern Florida, and you’ll see one of the most profound economic shifts in the US today.

Welcome to the New New South.

Electric-vehicle factories and battery plants are overtaking pine forests in this region of antebellum architecture and shrimp and grits. More broadly, the entire South from here, north to Kentucky and west to Texas is where businesses are moving to, jobs are being created and homes are being bought. The uplift isn’t happening equally everywhere, or equally for everyone. But the implications for the entire country are enormous.

It’s enormous all right. It’s a complete reversal. Take a gander at this helpful graph, showing that the southern conservative states’ share of national GDP has flipped with northeastern, blue states during the pandemic, in just two years:




I’m not sure anything like this has ever happened in U.S. history before. Thanks, blue state officials!

Ironically, one of the mega-corporations to recently move to Florida was economic powerhouse Dun & Bradstreet, which relocated to Jacksonville in 2021 after being headquartered in New Jersey for 182 straight years. Bloomberg didn’t mince words, either, correctly attributing the amazing turn of economics events to blue state governments’ ineffectual, overreaching pandemic policies:

Beth Woods, 47, and her husband were eager to escape the Covid-19 shutdowns and shuttered stores up north, so they started making bi-weekly trips from Mount Olive, New Jersey, soon after the pandemic struck. Before long, they decided to make the move permanent.

“You could get your hair done, your nails done, you could basically live your life. And it has lower property taxes here, too,” Woods said.

Every lawyer I know down here is swamped with work and turning away good cases. Hopefully, the southern states’ conservative social policies will continue to discourage woke liberals from moving down here. So … we need lots MORE conservative, pro-parent, pro-ethics, pro-freedom policies, which will help to keep the red states bright red.