In all the world, Sarasota is the place I’d most like to be. This hellishly-hot, humid, bug-infested swamp is my idea of paradise…assuming you’ve got lots of money. This sleepy little beach town is the kind of place where you meet your friends on the beach after work, to eat fresh seafood and watch the sun set over a cold drink. Politically, Florida is a boil on the ass of America.I did not coin the term “Redneck Riviera”, but I wholeheartedly concur. If we had any sense at all, we’d sell Florida back to Spain for a dollar and cut our losses, but we can’t because it’s so doggone pretty. Look at it! This really is living on vacation. The thing about Sarasota is that there’s no point in living there if you don’t have an awful lot of money. If you do, you get the Florida lifestyle…palm trees, azure gulf waters, sugar sand beaches, and everybody has a boat. And a boat slip to park it in, behind their mega mansions. But if you don’t have money, you’re kinda screwed in Sarasota. It doesn’t have much of a middle class. So if you’re not rolling in dough, chances are you’re working for these cheapskates, barely making it on the minimum wages they’re paying you to cut their grass, cook their lobsters, and clean their solid gold toilets. For you, Florida is fire ants, enormous spiders and gators creeping around your low-income housing.

Never has the gap between the haves and have-nots been more apparent than in Florida, no matter what you do or how hard you work. And these days, that sad fact is making it hard for rich folks to find workers to keep their ice cubes cold. Blue collar workers are fleeing Florida for the same reason they’re leaving California: Only rich people can afford to live there now. Ordinary people can’t find a viable path to the middle class. And without it, they can’t afford to live in this lush, geriatric paradise. They can only work there. Commuting an hour and a half from your affordable housing to the low-paying crap jobs you can get serving tourists in the city was bad enough. Now thanks to the pandemic, those jobs are largely gone and ordinary Floridians are flocking to friendlier habitats in Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi. At least there, they can afford to live in the same community where they work.