Venture Capital with a Southeastern heading
The Tax Foundation has issued its 2012 State Business Tax Climate Index, which once again confirms that the love of taxes is the root of unhappiness. We remain… happy. And happy to report that’s true for our region as well. When confronted with the argument that higher taxes = unhappiness, we wonder, even while remaining [...]
Our region took 9 out of the 10 top spots in Forbes’ list of The Next Big Boom Towns in the U.S. The rankings were done in conjunction with Mark Schill at the Praxis Strategy Group, and are based on job growth, attractive lifestyle, ease of starting a business, and a broad range of demographic [...]
For the seventh straight year, Texas has been voted the best state for business by Chief Exectuive magazine. 2011′s edition of their annual survey of CEOs includes an excellent interactive map. The Top 10 looks familiar to us, as it constitutes most of the geography in which we have focused our investment efforts for over [...]
In The Library in St.Pete you will find Amity Shlaes’ The Forgotten Man, in which Shlaes recounts how the TVA crowded out Wendell Wilkie’s Commonwealth & Southern, a private-equity-backed company ($400 million as reported in Wilkie’s testimony before a House committee) that was in the process of bringing electricity to the rural South. Since the [...]
The Chicago Tribune urges Illinois not to become a “New Michigan” or “New California” but instead mimic states such as FL, GA, VA, TN, TX, and NC. In an April 11 op-ed entitled The Illinois Spiral they reference the third edition of Rich States, Poor States (from the American Legislative Exchange Council) in which our region scores [...]
The New York Times confirms another reason for the Southeast’s attractive growth potential and why increasing numbers of entrepreneurs are deciding to build their businesses in the region: lower state debt burdens. As the attached graph shows, the problem worsens dramatically when one considers many states’ unfunded pension liabilities. (Click thumbnail for “top” 25 states for debt-to-GDP, “Overloaded with Debts Unseen”.) [...]
A recent study in Science magazine indicates that states with the highest taxes also have the least happy residents. The Wall Street Journal, reporting on the study, argues that the causation is high taxes = unhappiness. While we are certainly sympathetic to that point of view, we also have to wonder if it runs vice-versa, [...]
Forbes reports that the nation’s professional classes continue to move to the Southeast and Texas: Net migration, both before and after the Great Recession, according to analysis by the Praxis Strategy Group, has continued to be strongest to the predominately red states of the South and Intermountain West. This seems true even for those seeking [...]
from Venture Nashville Connections: The six grant-winning teams are linked to the University of Tennessee, the UT Health Sciences Center, Tennessee Tech, the University of Memphis, St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital, Middle Tennessee State University and the Y12 Security Complex at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
