Phil Mickelson hints tax changes may spur career change.

Alternate title: Golf Great Going Galt?

Let me use short words, here*: if you want less of something, tax it.  Because if you tax it, you will get less of it:

On the day President Obama was sworn in for his second term, [top professional golfer Phil] Mickelson sent shock waves through the Humana Challenge when he said the political landscape in the United States was causing him to seriously contemplate his future in golf.

[snip]

“If you add up all the federal and you look at the disability and the unemployment and the Social Security and state, my tax rate is 62, 63 percent,” Mickelson said. “So I’ve got to make some decisions on what to do.”

[snip]

In December, Mickelson, who was part of a group that had bought the San Diego Padres four months earlier, abruptly announced that he was no longer involved in the business deal. His reversal came shortly after California voters approved Proposition 30, which imposed a 13.3 percent tax rate on incomes of more than $1 million.

Asked Sunday if the election results played a role in his decision to sever his ties with the Padres’ ownership group, Mickelson replied, “Yeah, absolutely.”

Mickelson made 43 million dollars last year in celebrity endorsements alone; and there’s no real reason to think that he can’t make a similiar amount of money this year, too.  But… if he’s losing sixty-two cents of every dollar that he sees, what’s Mickelson’s incentive to hustle for more?  Particularly when he could, perhaps, combine hustling for less with moving to a state that’s much less likely to kill the goose to get at the golden eggs?  After all, to paraphrase Barack Obama: at some point you have to ask yourself whether you’ve made enough money.

…I certainly hope that every tax bureaucrat in the country gasped in horror when the President said that, by the way.  Unlike Barack Obama, they should be expected to understand that you don’t eat your seed corn.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*Mostly for the indirect benefit of the people assigned to monitor right-wing sites; they’ll probably be passing the gist of this post along, and I consider them to be considerably more intelligent than their political masters in the Democratic party.  Which is, admittedly, not particularly hard to do.