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Showing posts with the label Viro Beach

The Dangers Of Steady Habits: Why Florida Is A Boom Town And Connecticut A Wreck

My wife and I and Jake, her guide dog, are back from a short vacation in Florida, where we visited with her sister and a friend who moved out of Connecticut several years ago to be near his son. The many Nutmeggers we met in Naples and Vero Beach put me in mind of a story told about Rex Harrison, the famous British actor who moved to Belgium in order, some supposed, to escape Britain’s high taxes. Why did he move to Belgium, Harrison was asked by an aggrieved BBC reporter. Harrison smiled broadly and said he liked the chocolates. Florida is not known for its chocolates, but it has become a haven for the tired, wretched and increasingly poor Nutmeggers who like its Homestead Act. The Homestead Act is a bar to the kinds of increases in Connecticut property taxes that now threaten to impoverish all classes in the state but the very wealthy, whose fixed incomes are generous. They may not be so for long; our ever voracious legislature has been diddling for some time with a millionaire's...