Exodus costs CA
People and businesses flee California’s high taxes and regulations. How much does that cost the state budget? A new book by Travis Brown, “How Money Walks,” quantifies it; as does his website, howmoneywalks.com.
Writing in the Orange County Register, Adam Summers summarized Brown’s data:
“From 1992-2011, California’s annual adjusted gross income has decreased by $46.3 billion as a result of people moving out of state. Only New York (with a net loss of $71.4 billion) had a bigger drain. The chief beneficiaries of this outmigration were Nevada, which gained $9.9 billion in wealth from California transplants, Arizona ($8.1 billion), Texas ($6.4 billion), Oregon ($6.3 billion) and Washington ($5.5 billion).”
And given that state and local governments in California skim off about 11 percent of income through taxation, that means state and local governments here lost about $5 billion in tax revenues. That’s a big part of why the state has had budget problems in recent years. Productive people left, taking their part of the tax base with them.
Summers continued:
“There is a very strong correlation between people’s movements and state and local tax burdens. The states that saw the biggest wealth drain – New York, California, Illinois, New Jersey, Ohio, Michigan and Massachusetts – all ranked in the top half of states in the Tax Foundation’s newest ranking of state and local tax burdens (using fiscal year 2011 data). Conversely, nearly all the states that saw the greatest wealth gains – Florida, Arizona, Texas, North Carolina, Nevada, Georgia, South Carolina, Colorado and Washington – placed in the bottom half of states in terms of state and local tax burden, with the exception of North Carolina, which ranked 17th highest.”
The data do not include California’s mammoth, $7 billion tax increase in 2012 from Proposition 30.
It takes a lot to chase people away from the surf and sunshine, but California’s toxic government has done that. If the Golden State had the weather of North Dakota, nobody would be left.
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