Looking across the Connecticut River at Hartford.
From Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com
Connecticut has been hammered by Republican politicians for years for its high taxes and sluggish economy. From the propaganda you’d never know that Connecticut remains the richest state on a per-capita basis, followed by Massachusetts.
In any event, things are finally looking up in the Nutmeg State. Among the good news, The Hartford Courant reports:
Seven Stars Cloud Group, a financial technology company, will spend $283 million to create a tech hub at the former University of Connecticut regional campus in West Hartford.
Infosys will create a regional tech and innovation hub in Hartford, which has been in a steep economic and social slide for years, and hire 1,000 people for its information-technology and consulting business.
Stanley Black & Decker will open an advanced-manufacturing center in downtown Hartford to develop its “smart factory’’ initiative.
CVS will keep the headquarters of Aetna, which it is buying, in Hartford.
EIP LLC is setting up banks of computer servers in an abandoned factory in New Britain, an old factory town, to process and store data for many businesses.
Despite its woes of the past few years, Connecticut’s large number of highly educated people and its location between the wealth-creating behemoths of Greater Boston and New York will continue to make it very attractive to sophisticated businesses – generally more so than the low-or-no-income-tax and low-public-services Sunbelt states. The Northeast will remain, after all these years, the richest part of the country.
Meanwhile, the financial-services complex in Fairfield County, and especially Stamford, closely linked to nearby Wall Street, will slowly shrink, as artificial intelligence and other technological change, as well as offshoring, reduce job counts. Finance has been the biggest wealth creator in Connecticut for a long time. It’s a healthy sign for the state that geographical and industry diversification, most of it involving high technology, is well underway.
By the way, I spent much of a recent Friday and Saturday driving around to see friends in Westport, Norwalk and Greenwich, all in rich Fairfield County. If taxes on the rich are so onerous in the Nutmeg State (where I lived for four years when in school) how come I saw so many new mansions and McMansions going up? It looked richer than ever!
