America is broken. San Francisco is awash with fentanyl enthusiasts who hang around on every street corner like an army of zombies, Minnesota is a hotbed of state theft, New York is being run by a full-on communist, and if you so much as step out of line for the briefest of moments, a government sponsored redneck with military trousers and an ICE hat will shoot you in the middle of your face. And on top of all this, there’s a president who thinks he’s Jesus.
However, flying in the face of all this awfulness, there’s Florida, which by all accounts is not broken at all. Because there is no inheritance tax and no state income tax, America’s hedge coin and bit fund people have been arriving in droves. In the last 25 years, the number of billionaires living in the state has increased by a staggering 1,883 per cent, and this means the economy is booming like an F-15 on combat power.
It sounds like Rachel Reeves’s worst nightmare. Living proof that everything she believes in is wrong. That if you abolish taxes, everyone benefits. And so, while Britain still has a dribble of jet fuel, I thought I’d pop to Miami to have a look for myself.
It’s been a minute since I was last there, and holy cow. Not even Simon Cowell has changed this much this quickly. First things first. The bureaucracy. There was a time when I was driven insane by every official I encountered needing a permit for this and permission for that. But here’s how it went in my interview for Global Entry at the airport. “Love the farm show. You’re all set.”
And half an hour later, I was at Miami Beach, where the line of apartment blocks and lux-hotels now stretches as far as the eye can see. And they’re all beautiful and they’re all white, and when one of them starts to look a bit shabby, it’s taken down and replaced by something even whiter and even more beautiful.
I did notice that at night, only about 2 per cent of the lights were on, suggesting that the owners aren’t actually living there, and I got a similar vibe when I visited a Neiman Marcus mall which was full of all the usual Dubai-airport Tom Ford tosser shops. It was deserted. I guess it’s like Monte Carlo. You have a flat there, and then you employ an estate agent to pop round every other day to turn the lights on and off and make phone calls to demonstrate to the authorities that you really do live in it.
And that’s the thing. The absentee billionaires are employing someone to do that sort of thing. And they are also keeping the pool men busy, and the builders and the Ferrari dealers and especially the restaurants. In the olden days, when I visited America a lot more than I do now, I’d live on Denny’s all-day breakfasts. Now, you can dine on tern in a cucumber jus, or boiled baby sardine with cherry blossom salt. Lisa had skewered duck and lychee one night and said it was the best thing she’d ever put in her mouth. Which hurt. The point is that someone has to make all this stuff, so there’s no time to be a fenta-zombie.
This means the money sloshes about nicely. A waiter in my hotel told me his girlfriend drives a Ferrari Portofino. “Crikey,” I said. “What does she do?” “She sells, er, something on the internet. I’m not sure what.” So what about the downtrodden immigrants? Obviously, in America, unlike here, they are not given houses and Volvos, but that’s OK because what they do is put an umbrella up on the pavement above a sign saying valet parking, and they charge cash money to look after your car while you enjoy a boned guillemot. And they don’t hold back. I was charged $60, and when I asked why so much, he said “That’s a Land Rover Octa. That’s expensive. You can afford it.” And he was right.
Driving, however, is not easy in Miami Beach, because you spend most of your time stuck behind a municipal pick-up truck with bins in the back. It crawls along at 10mph and stops every so often so the driver can get out to pick up a bit of litter. They’re doing this on every street all the time, and as a result, there’s no mess at all. This made me very warm/fuzzy. And how can the state afford to do this when taxes are so non-existent? No idea. But they can also afford a big police presence. One night I saw nine squad cars turn up to marshal traffic while a broken-down Ferrari was loaded onto the tow truck. Nine.
Meanwhile, the pavements are littered with autonomous shopping carts taking food and other provisions from the shops to people’s houses. It was like being in the future. In England, yobbos would knock these carts over, or socialists would break into them to steal whatever was inside, but in America people just move aside to let them by. I didn’t. I just sat there and laughed as one of them tried for half an hour to navigate round a traffic light.
After a night in Miami’s new soccer stadium, where I was given rosé wine and a bucket of caviar, it was time to come home, and I used to look forward to doing that in the olden days. Because it was like going back from a police state to a country where I could smoke and drink and cross the road wherever I liked.
This time, though, not so much. Miami feels like it’s been plugged into the mains, and I was coming home to a country where the roads look like they’ve been attacked by badgers, the police are useless, the taxes are ridiculous, the benefits are worse, the exhibits in every art gallery are covered in soup, the harbours are full of statues and the prime minister doesn’t know what a woman is (clue: it’s the sex of the person who’s going to replace you).