XPost: alt.politics.trump, misc.taxes, sac.politics
XPost: talk.politics.guns
From: telford@ox.ac.uk
Iobaties wrote in news:sh6ac0$e6h$36@news.dns-netz.com:
> Vance wrote
>
> Demnocrats deserve every bad thing that happens to them.
The pandemic brought with it a great deal of changes. In many cases, this
included changes in scenery. Newly released IRS data shows that in the
first year of the pandemic, taxpayers fled high-tax states like New York
and California for low-tax states like Florida and Texas at an even faster
rate than before.
The IRS annually releases data on what states taxpayers moved to and from.
This data is delayed a few years, so the most recent release describes
where taxpayers moved to over the course of the first year of the
pandemic, in 2020.
It’s not a new phenomenon that New York and California have been
hemorrhaging taxpayers. The previous set of data, describing taxpayers’
moves in 2019, found that these two states combined to lose over 248,000
households and $37 billion in adjusted gross income (AGI) on net (moves
out after subtracting moves in).
But that went into overdrive in 2020, as millions of Americans found
themselves no longer expected — or able — to commute. In 2020, New York
and California combined to lose over 300,000 households and $53 billion in
AGI on net.
While not on the same scale as New York and California, the other big
losers from tax migration were exactly the states one might expect:
Illinois, Massachusetts, and New Jersey. In total, the ten biggest tax
migration losers lost over 430,000 households and $81.7 billion in AGI on
net.
But one state’s loss is another state’s gain — and in this case, that
“other state” is Florida. Florida gained over $39 billion in AGI on net
during 2020, more than the next nine biggest “winner” states combined.
Texas was the next biggest “winner,” gaining just under $11 billion in AGI
on net.
A clear theme among these winners and losers is that taxpayers fled to
greener tax pastures in 2020. The ten biggest tax migration “losers” had
an average of the 39th most taxpayer-friendly tax system, according to the
Tax Foundation’s State-Local Tax Burden rankings. The ten biggest
“winners,” on the other hand, averaged the 16th-most taxpayer-friendly tax
system.
Again using the Tax Foundation’s ranks, we can use the IRS’s data to see
how many moves in 2020 were tax-advantageous. Filtering out lateral moves
to a state with a roughly similar tax burden, more than 60 percent of
“tax-significant” moves in 2020 went to a better tax system. At the same
time, more than 70 percent of AGI involved in these “tax-significant”
moves went to a more taxpayer-friendly state.
Considering the multitude of reasons why Americans move, from work to
family to weather, that’s a very significant majority. Clearly, taxes are
not just one more consideration in Americans’ residency decisions — they
are often the primary one.
The obvious solution for these states that continue to see their residents
fleeing for lower-tax alternatives would be to restructure their tax
systems to be more competitive and less confiscatory. But as that is a
lesson that these states refuse to learn, taxpayers need to be aware of
their preferred solution — coming up with excuses to reach across their
borders to tax Americans in other states.
It’s great news that taxpayers are voting with their feet at greater rates
than ever before, and that the increasingly digitized economy is making
this possible. But real change won’t happen in the states taxpayers are
fleeing unless those states have no alternative but to fix their tax
systems.
Andrew Wilford is a senior policy analyst with the National Taxpayers
Union Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to tax and fiscal policy research
and education at all levels of government.
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* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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