Rachel Reeves\u2019s<\/a> 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\u2019d pop to Miami to have a look for myself.<\/p>\nIt\u2019s 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\u2019s how it went in my interview for Global Entry at the airport. \u201cLove the farm show. You\u2019re all set.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019re all beautiful and they\u2019re all white, and when one of them starts to look a bit shabby, it\u2019s taken down and replaced by something even whiter and even more beautiful.<\/p>\n
I did notice that at night, only about 2 per cent of the lights were on, suggesting that the owners aren\u2019t 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
And that\u2019s 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\u2019d live on Denny\u2019s 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\u2019d ever put in her mouth. Which hurt. The point is that someone has to make all this stuff, so there\u2019s no time to be a fenta-zombie.<\/p>\n
This means the money sloshes about nicely. A waiter in my hotel told me his girlfriend drives a Ferrari Portofino. \u201cCrikey,\u201d I said. \u201cWhat does she do?\u201d \u201cShe sells, er, something on the internet. I\u2019m not sure what.\u201d So what about the downtrodden immigrants? Obviously, in America, unlike here, they are not given houses and Volvos, but that\u2019s 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\u2019t hold back. I was charged $60, and when I asked why so much, he said \u201cThat\u2019s a Land Rover Octa. That\u2019s expensive. You can afford it.\u201d And he was right.<\/p>\n
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\u2019re doing this on every street all the time, and as a result, there\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the pavements are littered with autonomous shopping carts taking food and other provisions from the shops to people\u2019s 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\u2019t. I just sat there and laughed as one of them tried for half an hour to navigate round a traffic light.<\/p>\n
After a night in Miami\u2019s new soccer stadium, where I was given ros\u00e9 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.<\/p>\n
This time, though, not so much. Miami feels like it\u2019s been plugged into the mains, and I was coming home to a country where the roads look like they\u2019ve 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\u2019t know what a woman is (clue: it\u2019s the sex of the person who\u2019s going to replace you).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"America is broken. San Francisco is awash with fentanyl enthusiasts who hang around on every street corner like…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":237780,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[123,125,124],"class_list":["post-237779","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-miami","tag-miami","tag-miami-headlines","tag-miami-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237779","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=237779"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237779\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/237780"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}