After a helicopter flight this afternoon, I ran into a friend in the hangar. He works for the biggest air taxi (airplane charter) company in Massachusetts. “We just laid off two thirds of our staff,” he noted. “We’ve returned most of the airplanes to the lessors.” Driving home, I passed by Mattress Discounters. They had a “going out of business” sign out front. I stopped in to ask why. “They’re closing all of our New England stores,” said the manager.
We have cold weather, per-capita tax expense roughly double New Hampshire’s (compared to other states), and extremely high housing costs. Young people keep leaving to build careers in the more rapidly growing regions of the U.S. Still, I would have thought enough of us oldsters were still here to need a comfortable mattress…
[I did my share for the Massachusetts GDP this week. A crack appeared in my car’s windshield and the whole windshield needed to be replaced. This expanded GDP by at least $500. Maybe if we all smash each others’ windshields we can make the GDP numbers for Q3 look good…]
[Correction: The air taxi company has slimmed down on turboprops, from 6 to 3, partly due to the seasonality of business up here. They’re keeping their 4 Eclipse jets, but not counting on them for any revenue due to the fact that service and support for the Eclipse is almost non-existent. One serious problem with the Eclipse is that, although the plane in theory can be approved for flight into known icing conditions, in practice it is impossible to schedule an existing plane for the required retrofits. The Eclipse remains a jet that can flown only in clear and/or very warm weather.]
Ah, yes. The broken window fallacy. Always a fun (if facetious) argument. 😉
http://mises.org/story/2868
-Erica
The recession that we’re probably in is affecting the whole country. In fact, it appears to be turning into a global slowdown. A number of warm and hot states, such as California and Florida, will actually suffer much more than Massachusetts over the next year because real estate is a bigger part of the economy in those places.
It’s interesting that people think that the climate in MA is bad for the economy. I remember reading a special survey that the Economist magazine ran about 20 years on the New England economy. The writer thought that the cold weather was a benefit because it forced people to stay inside and thus put in more time at work.
On the other hand, if the climate in Massachusetts really is a drawback, maybe it’s a mistake for the state government to enter into compacts with other states to reduce carbon emissions. Perhaps of few degrees of global warming would make the winter more tolerable.
Here in Austin my startup can’t find an experienced LAMP programmer to interview, let alone hire. All the experienced LAMP developers have jobs.
House prices have stabilized, but have not declined, because they never spiked.
How any rational person can look at places like Detroit, Chicago, New Orleans, Massachusetts, or Michigan and then vote to turn management of the whole government to the same people who run those places is beyond me.
Unfortunate. But it is all relative we are looking at moving back to MA from VT because the economic opportunities in the Boston area far outstrip anything VT will have in the next 40 years. We tried the cheaper housing/lower wage living and it doesn’t work at least not up here. Granted the COL is fairly high in VT and the wages abysmal. Perhaps it works elsewhere but I’m not so sure. I’ll take the expensive metro area with at least the possibility of high pay.