For an interesting conversation on the flight of young, educated people from Upstate New York, hop over to Vodkapundit and check out the comments on a post that looks at a NY Times article on the subject.

Here’s one that jumped out at me:

Work for a software security company. We just closed our Toronto, Long Island, Albany and Waltham, MA offices and moved them all to Virginia due to the high costs in taxes and wages (from the high cost of living).

For what we were paying approximately 200 employees in those locations we can employee nearly 300 in Virginia. For the same amount of money I can hire 100 more people, produce more product and make more profit. I still have 2 programmer and one tester position open.

These are not low wage jobs. These are professional software development jobs of people making well into 5 figures (none under 50K) and some into 6 figures.

The region is being run into the ground, and our politicians are either too stupid or too corrupt to care.

But don’t worry. They’re going to get us our $230 million Renaissance Square. It’ll be such a nice place for the last seniors living here to hang out & listen to the crickets chirp.