Well, I'd say this is what good, competent governance gets you.
The six fastest-growing states in the Southeast now add more to the national GDP than the former powerhouse states in the Northeast.
It's not just football dominance that can be found in the Southeast, it's good old fashioned economic winning.
Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Texas, and North and South Carolina added 2.2 million residents in the last two years and have begun to shift the economic dominance in the United States southward.
It's not coastal states that are dominating now.
From Bloomberg:
The numbers tell the story. For the first time, six fast-growing states in the South — Florida, Texas, Georgia, the Carolinas and Tennessee — are contributing more to the national GDP than the Northeast, with its Washington-New York-Boston corridor, in government figures going back to the 1990s. The switch happened during the pandemic and shows no signs of reverting.
Huh, how about that? States that refused to kill their economies because of their conservative governance attracted business and residents thanks to their competent Republican governments.
The South is leading the way for the country, with states like Florida and Georgia being the first to aggressively reopen in 2020.
And the trend is continuing because Republicans like to provide a good place for people to live.
A flood of transplants helped steer about $100 billion in new income to the Southeast in 2020 and 2021 alone, while the Northeast bled out about $60 billion, based on an analysis of recently published Internal Revenue Service data.
The Southeast accounted for more than two-thirds of all job growth across the US since early 2020, almost doubling its pre-pandemic share. And it was home to 10 of the 15 fastest-growing American large cities.
In recent decades, the warmer weather, lower taxes, looser regulation and cheaper housing lured companies and retirees. But this pandemic-era Sun Belt economic upswing is wider in scope.
"You could throw a dart anywhere at a map of the South and hit somewhere booming," said Mark Vitner, a retired longtime economist for Wells Fargo who now heads his own economic consultancy, Piedmont Crescent Capital, in Charlotte, North Carolina.
It's amazing what competent and consistently conservative governments can achieve.
