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Since COVID’s arrival in February 2020, red states where Republicans hold sway have benefited more in economic terms than Democrat-controlled blue states, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The shift to remote work freed hundreds of thousands of workers to live where they choose.
The COVID-era real estate boom also convinced many Baby Boomers to cash out of their homes and retire to warmer weather.
As a result, many households moved from the business centers along the coasts and in the north to cheaper homes and more spacious communities in the middle of the U.S. and southern states, where taxes often have been lower.
Some people may have jumped to red states because many offered fewer restrictions on movement and business during the COVID War, but data is too sketchy to draw a conclusion.
However, red states tended to have fewer school and business closures, mask mandates, and various forms of draconian lockdowns than blue states.
Over the last 2.5 years, red states have added 341,000 jobs, while blue states were still short 3.1 million jobs, compared to pre-COVID numbers, according to U.S. labor market data.
Small cities, suburbs, and rural areas gained residents; populations shrank in large metro areas with large numbers of commuters
Moves were made not only by individuals, but also by corporations.
Caterpillar transplanted its headquarters from Illinois to Texas. Hedge fund Citadel left Chicago for Miami, joining the migration of financial firms from northern locales to Florida, which we reported in “U.S. Financiers: Bye-Bye Wall Street” (2 Feb 2021).
In the Texas magnet cities of Austin and Houston, office occupancy rates have rebounded more quickly than in the U.S. as a whole.
In those two cities, occupancy has climbed back above half, while remaining at about a third in San Francisco and 40 percent in Los Angeles, according to Kastle Systems, which analyzes swipe-card data.
In the 10 cities that grew the most, home prices were 23 percent less at the beginning of the COVID war than in the 10 cities that lost the most residents, the American Enterprise Institute said.
Among the states that attracted the largest numbers of new dwellers, the average income tax rate was 3.8 percent. Florida, Tennessee, Texas, and Nevada levied no income tax.
In contrast, the income tax rate averaged 8 percent among states that saw the most people leave.
Tennessee’s economy grew more than any other state’s last year, expanding by 8.5 percent, the WSJ reported. Unemployment sank to a record-low 3.2 percent and workers saw wages grow 8.6 percent.
The study could provide no data on whether people moved to red states largely as a matter of political preference.
TREND FORECAST: The more people that leave states and the less tax revenue the states receive the deeper they will go into debt. Also, as we had forecast, the more people that leave and the more businesses that go out of business, the crime rates will escalate… as they already have. As Gerald Celente says, “When people lose everything and have nothing left to lose, they lose it.”
These trends will further push more people out of strong COVID War states to less stringent ones. And, as there are new COVID War fear and hysteria warnings being promoted by the media and politicians, the move from blue to red will continue to escalate.
And this trend is not your friend. Today the clown playing the World Health Organization’s chief, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said he was worried that COVID cases were rising and that the COVID War is “nowhere near over” because new virus waves around the world are “running freely”.