I thought it was all tied to air conditioners.
North Carolina is physically a pretty nice place to live, but people are mostly moving here for the lower cost of living.
That said, get enough yankees and immigrants in here and that will start to fix things. The state is already purple presidentially.
No major change on a statewide level till the 2020 Census broaches the possibility of broad redistricting, though. And even then, given the vice grip supermajority the other side holds, there’s no guarantee things change enough. By that time, a lot of damage will have been (and already has been) done. But working in education, particularly with super-high-performing teachers, I may have a slightly different view of that (insofar as we’re now having a devil of a time recruiting our core demographic group since they’re fleeing the state en masse).
It’s things like this, and the GA/AL examples above, that make me take a very dim view of States’ rights discussions. So long as a goodly portion of states are set upon being backwards havens of hatred and xenophobia, letting them do damn-near whatever they want to their own populace while we wait for the next Constitutional Amendment that’s probably not coming anytime soon feels exceedingly wrong. In the end, some states just need to be drug into the future, kicking and screaming, the desires of the country yokels and religious nutjobs given outsized electoral power by gerrymandering and geography nothwithstanding.
Of course, given my apparent desire to surround myself with an echo chamber of young, radically liberal leftists socially, you might imagine that my FB is particularly exciting today! ;)
My wife and I fell in love with the Raleigh area during our visit awhile back and still plan on moving down at some point. Hopefully NC can get it’s shit together by then.
It’s a big part of the current ALEC playbook, using state-level Preemption laws to prevent any undesirable liberal ideas from springing up in cities or counties.
The arguments and PR for this law were full of “common sense”, “privacy and etiquette”; the same sort of arguments that supported segregation and blocked biracial marriage in the past. I don’t think it even took the governor an hour to sign it. A real emergency session indeed.
NC didn’t use to feel like this, but a decade of single-party Republican control of the state is having many effects, like this, as well as voter ID, education, environment, energy policy…
BTW, the special legislative session to pass this odious law cost NC taxpayers $42,000.
Tell me again about “small government”, conservatives. Try to keep a straight face.
I love the tone deaf hubris of this. We need to get the “right people (yankees and immigrants)” down there to “start to fix things” but they are moving there because of a lower cost of living. As if the reason they are moving down there has nothing to do with current policies. A+ sir!
An interesting point, really. The lower cost of living in many states is supported by policies that are in the long term destructive, that is, reducing or even gutting the tax base through incentives to businesses to relocate, erosion if not elimination of workers’ rights to the point that, eventually, you’ll create a region of vastly depressed wages and hence depressed buying power, and relaxed environmental regulations that, while in the short term encouraging economic growth, in the long term destroy the very foundation for any growth, or even sustainability. Mind you, these things are by no means limited to the southern states, but a combination of historical and contemporary economic trends and cultural proclivities tends to make certain states more likely to go down these paths.
Of course, all regions are guilty when it comes to stuff like sports stadiums getting sweetheart deals, but that’s another issue.
Arizona is a dry heat. But nobody would live there without the invention of air conditioning.
A lot of the high tech companies in and around Research Triangle Park are dying for highly trained, educated workers. What few we produce in the STEM fields seem liable to flee the state anyway. The well-educated northerners and foreigners they tend to import to staff their units down here wind up dissatisfied with the poor-quality schools and public services in the area–and these are the folks living in one of the few areas of concentrated wealth and opportunity in the whole state.
On the flipside, things like the tax incentives you mention make shifting a large portion of your business operations to NC lucrative in other respects. I’m curious to see if any majors in RTP or elsewhere will re-do the math on this and head elsewhere in the next 5-10 years.
It makes sense to shift to low-tax areas if you’re going to hire low-wage laborers who won’t be pissed off at the lack of services a low-tax environment brings, I’m guessing.
It’s only been 6 years not even a decade- also governor would have had his veto overrode if he had tried. This won’t pass a legal challenge, especially in a year’s time when Hillary gets to name a new justice and they’ll do some needed legislating from the bench.
They could’ve at least used the special session to reduce the statute of limitations for failing to return a VHS tape.
Hope it’s not a death sentence under the Christian caliphate…
To be fair, he did rent Freddy Got Fingered. Death would be a mercy.
You do realize there are people that have actually declared a caliphate and are actually murdering people for its cause right? Considering the modern context not sure a bunch of legislatures that, as far as I know, haven’t killed anyone over religion should have such an association.
Yes, I fully understand the game I’m playing.
Hey it’s your game, play with self as much as you’d like.
Not to be outdone, Georgiais getting into the race as well. And incurring the wrath of Hollywood, which I’m sure matters very little to most of the people on the other side, though I don’t know how much revenue would actually be lost if the threatened boycotts actually happen.
Hollywood is doing it wrong. They should film more movies in those areas, but they should all make fun of how ass-backwards those states are. Portray them in a bad, bad light.
Well, we did have Smoky and the Bandit already, three of them I think…oh, and Deliverance! “Squeal like a pig!”