Where the Very Rich Fly to Hide, Wyoming's Jackson Hole has become a redoubt against the coronavirus

[yaesu]

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A wall of jagged peaks rises nearly 14,000 feet above the valley floor of Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming. Seeing it for the first time can literally be jaw-dropping as you fly into the valley of Jackson Hole, where private jets carrying wealthy passengers fleeing Covid-19 hot spots elsewhere have landed in recent weeks.

Some have brought their own medical equipment — even a ventilator, according to one local doctor — to this remote corner of Wyoming. With its magnificent landscape and extremely favorable state tax policies for the rich, Teton County, home to Jackson Hole, has quietly become the richest county in the United States. Its per capita income is the nation’s highest, at $251,728, nearly $58,000 more than Manhattan, its closest competitor. The county’s 1 percent earned an average of $22.5 million a year in 2015.

Christie Watts, a life coach based in Jackson Hole, said that at the height of the recent influx, “it was difficult to receive” official alerts for residents to stay home “while the airport was crammed with hundreds of people.”

Plane landings have slowed in recent weeks as wealthier arrivals have hunkered down. Yet even a slow trickle of virus interlopers can have an outsize impact on a small rural enclave.

The chasm between the rich and the rest in Teton County is bridged by an uneasy alliance between the wealthy owners of vacation homes and the lower-income residents who depend on them for their livelihoods. The county has the country’s widest disparity in income between the top 1 percent and the bottom 99. Now the pandemic is laying bare the tensions of that relationship as service workers must choose between continuing to do jobs that may expose them to the virus, or risk the loss of wages, health insurance and eviction. All three of the area’s ski resorts shut down about a month early because of the pandemic, and restaurants and the national parks are closed.

“It’s disgraceful to see people not understand the severity of the problems,” one airport worker told me. “It makes it uneasy to provide the services we do to these kinds of people. I live paycheck to paycheck and I don’t have much saved up in my account to handle” a serious illness.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/15/opinion/jackson-hole-coronavirus.html

[pbmus]

1. This is not the very rich, this is just the millionaires...

The very rich are jetting to New Zealand and other parts of the world...

[EarthFirst]

4. Yes; NZ is where the ultra-elite are creating their escape society...

I recently read about this as well.

[2naSalit]

5. Billionaires ran off the millionaires a long time ago...

They live on the other side of the pass in Idaho. Same thing going on up here in Montana just a short distance northwest of JH. I remember when you had to drive around the square to get through town and pick up which every highway you were going to catch there. Once it got Californiacated, just not the same.

[Loki Liesmith]

2. Great town.

Want to retire there.

[moose65]

3. Love that place!

And IIRC, Teton County is the only Democratic county in Wyoming.

[2naSalit]

6. Once the pandemic runs through there...

property prices might go down.

[bdamomma]

7. no one

is immune.

[Loki Liesmith]

8. Dark

[smirkymonkey]

9. The virus is very democratic.

As long as they depend upon the lower classes to serve them and wait on them, they won't be safe for long.

[2naSalit]

10. That's true...

After a few weeks of cleaning up after themselves, things will change. Unless they brought in slaves.