The New South….People and Money going South….Poverty Remains ….

Another piece on the migration of America’s people’s….

This driven by economic’s….

The South has some of nations poorest people and Republican lawmakers seem to careless…..

Could it also have political ramifications?

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.

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.

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….

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The term “New South” was coined after the Civil War during a time of economic transition for the formerly slave-owning region. “The South has always been reinventing itself,” said Gavin Wright, an economic historian who studies the southern economy. “Every generation seems to have its ‘New South.’”

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….

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Whether the growing conservative tilt on issues including reproductive rights could chip away at the influx of people willing to move to some southern states remains to be seen. There’s no evidence that it has slowed the flow of migration.

For now, more people translate into more congressional seats and more political power on the national scene. Over the past five decades, 12 states in the Southeast including Texas collectively added 33 more congressional seats, roughly the same number that the Northeast and Midwest each lost over the same period.

And Southerners now chair 11 of the 21 most important committees in the US House, according to an analysis by Bloomberg Government….

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For a century and a half, the South has struggled to overcome its position as America’s economic backwater. Even now, despite pockets of new prosperity, life across much of this region tends to be poorer and shorter than in most other parts of the country. Nowhere arguably does the legacy of slavery and segregation run deeper….

More….