The Great Covid Business Migration: States with Onerous Lockdowns Lost Employers as well as Workers; Pandemic Relief Money Went Toward Drag Shows and Critical Race Theory, and other C-Virus related stories
WSJ: The Great Covid Business Migration:
States with onerous lockdowns lost employers as well as workers.
We’ve chronicled the pandemic population flight from states with high taxes and high living costs that also imposed excessive lockdowns. A new report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) shows that small businesses also left town.
The bureau examined trends in single-establishment business migration since the early 1990s using data from its quarterly census on employment and wages. It found that while migration fell during the 2001 and 2007-2009 economic downturns as business activity generally slowed, moves accelerated during the Covid lockdowns.
BLS counted 6,384 businesses in 2021 that had moved across state lines during the prior year, up from 5,524 in 2020 and 3,677 in 2010. Net migration to the South and from the Northeast doubled between 2020 and 2021. After gaining businesses from other states for most of the last three decades, the West lost a net 175 in 2021—mostly from California.
New York led in net business out-migration (487), followed by California (456), Illinois (208), Maryland (50) and Pennsylvania (33). Florida (399), North Carolina (148), Nevada (103), Texas (103) and Tennessee (92) drew the most businesses from other states. All besides North Carolina have no income tax.
These figures probably underestimate the business migration that occurred early in the pandemic since they don’t capture larger firms shifting headquarters or workforces to other states. Texas saw a spike in headquarter relocations in 2020 (42) and 2021 (80), more than half of which came from California. —>READ MORE HERE
Pandemic relief money went toward drag shows and critical race theory:
Some pandemic relief money has funded controversial liberal priorities that far fall outside the bounds of what most would consider COVID-19 recovery.
The latest example occurred last week in New Hampshire, where a school district near Manchester used COVID-19 relief funding to pay for a Pride event that was scheduled to include drag performances for children.
But across the country, local and federal officials have poured money that lawmakers insisted was necessary to prevent an economic disaster into projects that are wasteful, ineffective, or, in many cases, fronts in the culture wars.
The New Hampshire school used $4,000 in American Rescue Plan Act money to fund the Pride event, according to the NH Journal.
In Utah, state education officials used pandemic funding to produce a video that encouraged teachers to introduce “gender play” and explorations of gender identities to their classrooms. The video sparked outrage among parents and other state officials when its contents, as well as the fact that CARES Act funding paid for it, surfaced in February.
Some schools have used pandemic funding to build gender-neutral bathrooms to accommodate transgender students, such as a middle school in Maine that planned to use $32,000 of American Rescue Plan Act money for gender-neutral bathrooms and another Maine school that planned to use some of the $161,000 in funding it got from the American Rescue Plan Act for gender-neutral bathrooms.
Many schools spent pandemic relief funds on the implementation of critical race theory curricula or on putting teachers through progressive “equity” training.
Massachusetts’s plan for spending its $1.8 billion in American Rescue Plan money, for example, identified “engaging in robust agency-wide anti-racism training and development of an equity planning tool” as a top need for state schools. —>READ MORE HERE
Follow links below to relevant/related stories and resources:
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White House mandates masks, distancing for unvaccinated — despite emergency’s end
USA TODAY: Coronavirus Updates
YAHOO NEWS: Coronavirus Live Updates
NEW YORK POST: Coronavirus The Latest
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