The New South, Brought to You by the Old North

The reason the South has boomed since WWII can be distilled into three main forces.
1) Air Conditoning. The Carrier Corporation, historically based out of Syracuse (think of the Carrier Dome) made air-conditioning cheap enough for everyone. It changed the classic slow-lethargic southern towns and manners. It made possible the go-go business oriented cities like Atlanta, Houston, and Charlotte.
2) Cheap electricity. The Tennessee Valley Authority damned up the Tennessee River all the way from Alabama to Tennessee, generating cheap electricity to a region whos poor inhabitants sometimes lived in lightless shacks.
3) The Interstate Highway system. Unlike legitimately wealthy states like NY, NJ, PA, and Mass., the South built no four-lane throughways. The federally-funded interstate highways took care of that, on our dime.

This is why Southern voters and politicians are fundamentally phony. They rail about taxes, then end up reaping the reward for what the programs have done (and I didn't even get into the build-up of military bases and contractors). Some of it is simply semantics. You say taxes, they say welfare-dependent population. It is a dependent population - on government and military programs that benefit them.