Go woke, go broke. Ever since peak COVID-19, traditional powerhouses of economic value like leftist California and New York have been losing money and residents hand over fist, while red states — particularly in the South — have boomed.
Leftist Axios’s Mike Allen reported on America’s shift in each state’s share of our national Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Allen framed it as “head[ing] for sun” in his email newsletter, but that’s not the whole picture. It’s no coincidence that this shift happened during peak COVID, when Democrat states imposed seemingly never-ending and authoritarian lockdown restrictions, even as southern red states were opening up. Since then, continuing Democrat insanity, such as going all-out on transgender surgeries for kids, has encouraged common sense Americans to move from blue states that used to be hotspots of economic activity.
Axios naturally would not want to admit this, since the site leans left and enthusiastically backed harsh COVID-19 measures, but it’s not just businesses that go woke and go broke. States can do it, too.
The six fastest-growing states — Texas, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, and North and South Carolina, according to Allen — are experiencing a “$100 billion wealth migration” based on Bureau of Economic Analysis data. Those states now contribute more to America’s national GDP than the Northeast, which used to be the economic powerhouse, Allen wrote, citing Bloomberg.
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, Bloomberg writes from IRS data.
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The Census Bureau also identified nine of the 15 fastest-growing U.S. cities as being in the South. Six of those nine cities were in Texas. While illegal immigration does help drive population growth in Texas, there’s also plenty of Americans moving there from elsewhere in the country.
The question is, will this end up damaging red states? Axios listed the three cities with the biggest population increase between 2021 and 2022 as being Fort Worth, Texas, Phoenix, Arizona, and San Antonio, Texas. As an Arizonan, I have watched Phoenix turn from a fairly conservative city to a Democrat-controlled one. Too many Californians moved there and kept voting Democrat, not seeming to understand that they had specifically moved to Arizona to escape Democrat policies.
Related: Nearly Half of Californians Are Considering Moving Out of the State
All of which is to say that it is a good thing if Americans want to escape wokeness and destructive Democrat policies, but please don’t vote to turn Texas and Arizona into New York and Illinois. Otherwise, the new economic boom in red states will quickly go the way of the formerly prosperous Northeast: straight into the ground.
