Americans Are Fleeing Blue Northeast for U.S. Southeast: Bloomberg

More than 2 million people and an estimated $100 billion in wealth relocated to the Southeast United States in 2020 and 2021, according to an Bloomberg analysis released this week.

From Bloomberg:

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.

Since 2020, almost two-thirds of all new jobs created in the US economy have been in the southeastern states.

Remarkably, the share of national GDP attributable to Florida, Texas, Georgia, Tennessee, and the Carolinas now surpasses that of New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, Washington, D.C., Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey.

While Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey have seen large out-migration patterns since government lockdowns began in 2020, not every state in the northeast is losing residents.

During the period Bloomberg examined, more than 34,000 U.S. residents relocated to Maine.

The analysis doesn’t mention state income taxes, but it’s worth pointing out that Florida, Texas, and Tennessee all have zero state income taxes.