We’ve devoted lots of attention to the sad and rapid demise of blue state/blue city America.  Colorado has always been an exception with rapid growth and modest taxation.

Denver has been a boom town, with its population growing nearly 20% during the 2010s.

But the Colorado legislature has been taken over by progressives while at the same time Denver’s City Hall is run by activists who have allowed taxes and homelessness to soar.

TIAA, the financial retirement firm, is closing its Denver office and moving to Frisco, Texas. Call-center company TTEC has moved its HQ to Austin.

Now Palantir, the high-level software tech company that moved from Palo Alto to Denver in 2020 to escape the anti-business climate in California, is headed to Miami. Why? Denver pols are even threatening Euro-style anti-AI regulations that crippled the European tech industry.

Even the Denver Gazette decried the serious blow these departures are to the local economy:

“Palantir’s departure is of course an economic blow. That’s abundantly clear in an analysis released Tuesday by Colorado’s Common Sense Institute. The institute’s report calculated the direct costs of the company’s relocation of its highly paid, high-tech staff of 724: a total loss of 544 people from Colorado; $106 million a year in gross domestic product; $178 million a year in economic output, and $107 million a year in income.

The departure of Colorado’s most highly valued public company… could compromise the national reputation that the state cultivated over the last 15 years.”

Maybe Denver should try to be a little more like Miami and less like New York and Minneapolis.