Miami Vice, the Magic Kingdom, spring break, alligators and retirement homes. These things are often associated with Florida but Florida is changing. If you look at Miami right now, it's definitely a migration.
They're coming from everywhere, most notoriously New York and Chicago. It has become a tech haven as well as a financial services haven. The state has really done an effort to court financial workers, to court hedge funds, to court private equity, to court banks and create what we call Wall Street South.
Florida has also transformed into the center of the Republican Party. The rise of Florida Republicans really begins with Covid. When the whole country was locked down But DeSantis had decided to keep Florida open and went around bragging about what he called the free state of Florida.
The great state of Florida. Trump has made Mar-a-Lago the center of the United States government. And the people in his administration have roots in Florida.
The whole ethos of the modern Republican Party is Florida. Trump himself is Florida. So why is Florida so trendy?
And with a second Trump presidency and Republican majority in Congress, will Florida politics spread to the rest of the country? In the wake of the January 6th riots, Trump finally left. Returned to Mar-a-Lago, holed-up there in a kind of political exile, But while he was down there, it became clear that Trump still had an iron grip on the Republican Party.
Mar-a-Lago has become the MAGA Mecca, right? Mar-a-Lago is located on a stretch of this barrier island called Palm Beach, And up and down that island, there are people with vast fortunes who have been supporters of Trump's presidency. People like, Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Neil Cavuto.
We're talking about Nelson Peltz, Steve Schwarzman. John Paulson, Thomas Peterffy. There has been really this combination of people from captains of industry, captains of finance, who are all converging, Mark Zuckerberg.
Scott Basson, Mark Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capitalist, he says he now spends more than half his time in Mar-a-Lago. I remember talking to a Trump official who explained the appeal. He said, we've got no masks, no lockdowns, good restaurants, great beaches, and Donald Trump being here is just the cherry on top.
It’s not just Trump acolytes who are nesting in Florida from 2020 to 2023, 158 companies managing $993 billion in assets moved their headquarters out of New York. 104 of them moved to Florida. Many notable names expanded operations there as well.
But the biggest thing that is part of the Wall Street South movement is Citadel, the hedge fund and market making firm created by Ken Griffin. His fortune is over $40 billion and he has a record of being engaged in the community, not just philanthropically, but also politically. In the letter that he sent to all of his employees, he used this phrase “Miami embodies the American dream.
” the biggest question is who actually benefits from that American dream? The dream-like wealth flowing into the state also has it’s downsides. The money going to Florida is definitely driving inequality.
If you're a billionaire, chances are you can get a direct benefit from that American dream. But if you're a person who has driven out of your home because an influx of wealth made prices unbelievably more expensive, maybe you don't benefit as much. One of the biggest draws in Florida is that it has no state income tax.
But property taxes are pretty high, especially with property values coming up. There’s also all sorts of consumption related taxes. Some would consider Florida one of the most regressive tax systems in America.
Florida’s regressive tax system means that low income families pay almost five times more in taxes than the state’s highest earners. Then look at the US average - the gap is far smaller. The state's low tax reputation applies largely to the wealthy.
Tlhe states at the bottom of this chart are less equal. Now look at Florida. It shows that, when indexed across the nation, Florida's tax code exacerbates inequality more than any other state.
' If you look over the past five years in Miami, specifically, home prices have gone up almost 70%. They have gone up across the board to parts of the Panhandle, Jacksonville, Naples. Almost one third of Miami is severely rent burdened, which means that they spend more than 50% of their income in rent.
Florida's housing issues are only compounded by its geography. Florida is on the front line of vulnerability to rising sea-levels, warmer temperatures that are causing more hurricanes. If you're rich, you can afford to build yourself some sort of bunker, or you can self-insure.
If you're not, then either you buy very expensive insurance, or maybe you're completely uninsurable. So if disaster hits, that's basically billions and billions of dollars that are razed to the ground. But the mounting liabilities aren't slowing Florida's growth.
recently resulted in Florida The gain in population that Florida has seen, adding a seat in the House of Representatives in Washington. So population gain means more people, looking out for Florida's interests in the capital. Florida's, the third most populous state in the United States, and it's also one where the population is growing the fastest.
And an important contingent of this population is the Hispanic community. In South Florida in particular, the makeup of the Spanish population is mostly Cuban Americans and Venezuelans. By some accounts, more than half of the Hispanic population in South Florida in particular voted for Trump.
I really do believe there are very important lessons for America, from the good governance that you see here in the state of Florida, particularly at the state and county level. Florida’s governance is dominated by its governor, Ron DeSantis, and his fellow Republicans, who have been steadily gaining control for years. Part of the way that Ron DeSantis distinguished himself once he became Florida governor, was to pick a bunch of cultural fights.
The most famous way was by picking a big fight with the Disney corporation, claiming that they were too friendly to gay people. And wound up trying to take away some of their tax breaks. If you go back to Florida in 2000, it was famously the scene, of the hanging chads, the tied election between George Bush and Al Gore.
And we can look at that moment when Florida increased its profile on the national stage as playing a meaningful role in the presidential election. Florida was the prototypical swing state. But in the years since then, it's moved steadily to the right, to the point that Florida today is just a deep red state.
Even the centerpiece of, Democratic Florida, Miami-Dade County, which has been blue for decades, wound up going to Donald Trump this time around. Florida has become a bastion for some of the most conservative policies in the nation. You have one of the biggest school choice programs across America.
You have a massive crackdown on undocumented workers. You have policies on education, which kind of determine what should be taught in terms of, gender policy in classrooms. Republicans are using Florida as one of their biggest laboratories in the nation.
If you look at at who Trump is bringing in to run his next administration, the bulk of the people seem to be from Florida. Everybody from Susie Wiles, his Chief of Staff, to Marco Rubio, his nominee for Secretary of State, Mike Waltz, a Florida Congressman, is going to be his National Security Advisor. Pam Bondi, Trump's attorney general nominee.
With all eyes pointed towards the state, the Republican policy experiments brewed in Florida could soon be exported to the rest of the country. When you have the international coverage of Trump planning his next administration in Palm Beach, the world thinks of it as a center of power. Donald Trump himself has said he considers the White House, quote unquote, a total dump.
That probably means you won't want to spend a lot of time there. I think there are few places in the world where you're seeing such a combination of money, power, wealth, politics, all mixed together, all influencing each other. This is not your grandmother's Florida anymore.
