John Fund of NRO:
The numbers are clear. Between 1995 and 2010 over $2 trillion in adjusted gross income moved between the states. That’s the equivalent of the GDP of California, the ninth largest GDP in the world. Some of the movement might be due to weather — that helps to explain some of Florida’s $86.4 billion gain and New York’s $58.6 billion loss. But we can attribute a great deal to the fact that capital flows to where it is best treated. Travis Brown, author of the new book How Money Walks, reports that the nine states without a personal income tax gained $146 billion in new wealth while the nine states with the highest income tax rates lost $107 billion.
This is the point where people in the states getting the influx start muttering that the people fleeing from high-tax states often bring bad fiscal habits and ways of thinking with them, and that’s a legitimate point. On the other hand, at least some of those people are moving precisely because they want to get away from the aforementioned bad habits; besides, this isn’t Soviet Russia. People are allowed to move: actually, they can just move, and there’s nothing ‘allowed’ about it. So I suggest a careful program of acquainting new residents in the joys of a relatively smaller-government way of life…
Moe Lane
PS: There’s going to be an interesting Supreme Court case coming up called Comptroller v. Wynne; essentially, the case is about whether “states must provide a credit against its own taxes for taxes a resident pays to another state.” A ruling on this might have some effect on states like New York. A very humorous effect, if you’re the sort of person who enjoys watching public sector accountants run around screaming. …And who among us does not?
The sad thing is, many of those who leave CA and NY bring their toxic political ideology with them.
The answer to this is a very local, positive, vocal, virulent, and thoroughly slap-in-the-face to big-government culture.
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I would love to say Texas ticks all those boxes, but .. y’all are a little weak on the anti-big-government. (or y’all haven’t gotten around to burning out the fire ant mounds running Dallas and Austin yet…)
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Mew
They aren’t interested in attending such a program. Most of them truly believe that we backwards hillbillies should be grateful for their deigning to “bless” us with their presence.
Compelling them to attend such a program would be distasteful for us, and they’d resent it.
‘s not a *program*, ‘s a *culture*.
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Texas is, unfortunately, the best example I have of how to go about this, and I really dislike some aspects of the Texan culture .. but they have the right idea.
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If that can be done with a little less brash in-your-face and a little more that’s-stupid-because, it can be very successful.
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Mew
Dewey’s system of public instruction in his secular religion has pretty much put paid to that out here.
Sure, all students are required to take Idaho history, but it’s been heavily airbrushed, and has been for many decades. (Territorial Governors absconding with the public treasury? Nowhere to be found. Martial Law being declared twice? You’d never know. The reasons that Bummers, Southerners fleeing Reconstruction, and Mormons formed a state on the basis of shared distrust in the federal government? Completely missing. But you’ll get two months of Chief Joseph trying to lead his tribe to Canada. And you’ll learn the oldest existing building in the state is the Cataldo Mission.)
The culture, such as it is continues only because of momentum. And with illegal aliens and California refugees now outnumbering natives…
We’re screwed.
We can hold pieces together, here and there, now and then, but the Idaho of yesteryear is all but gone.
The *everything* of yesteryear is all but gone .. that’s part of the whole “yesteryear” package.
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About the only reason Idaho won’t turn into California is it’s too damn cold, and cold requires a certain amount of self-reliance just to survive.
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Mew
They believe in global warming.
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It’s been extremely annoying. They’ve been moving into the population centers, and pressuring the local governments to sell their snowplows before they become worthless.
After all, with the coming balmy winters, snowplows won’t be necessary, and they have fairly high upkeep costs. Getting rid of them now is the only fiscally responsible path! (Also, putting salt on the road is not friendly to the environment. So they demand the use of liquid de-icer that freezes when the temp hits single digits. Which it does, even in mild winters like the last couple.)
Entirely too many cities have listened.
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Fricking morons.
Luke, that’s what you call opportunity.
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Get together a group of sane and rational folks, take one or more of those plows off the government’s paws, then .. lease it back come the second or third serious storm.
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Mew
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p.s. you can do the same thing with salt even easier, provided you’ve got the pole barn to store it in…
The county was *more* than happy to take them off the city’s hands. Which is great for those of us out in the country.
It just kind of sucks when we have to go into town.
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The county has made that offer. The city calls it extortion and refuses. The last few winters have been mild enough that they’ve mostly gotten away with it. (It’s not like the city has to pay for traffic accidents.)
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We’re due for a run of brutal winters. (Well, relatively, anyway. People from North Dakota would probably wear shorts.) It’ll be interesting to see what happens.
But really, the winters here aren’t generally too bad. We’re in the rainshadow of the Sierra Nevada, the Cascades, the Blues, and the Owyhee Plateau, so the adiabatic warming rate generally keeps it from getting too cold (or wet, for that matter). The various branches of the Rocky Mountain cordillera to our North and West mostly protects us from the occasional polar vortex. We’re still definitely in 4-season territory, but it’s a rare year that the temps go -15 or lower, or that we get more than a few inches of snow in a storm.
And here I thought this post was about the increasing rate of expatriations among Americans…but same principle.
There are many American retirees living in Mexican beach communities because their retirement funds can buy a very nice life.
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I don’t really see that as a problem either .. since most of the folks who retire there are coming out of high-tax-high-retirement-bennies States.
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What do I care if Illinois sends millions in retirement checks to addresses south of the border every year?
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Mew