Compared to California, that is.
Some takeaways:
- “Besides Mississippi, every one of the 17 states with the lowest state and local tax levels had positive net internal migration from 2000 to 2007. Except for Wyoming, Maine, and Delaware, every one of the 17 highest-tax states had negative net internal migration over the same period. Conservative researchers’ technical explanation for this phenomenon is: ‘Well, duh.’ Or, as Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore wrote in the Wall Street Journal earlier this year: ‘People, investment capital and businesses are mobile: They can leave tax-unfriendly states and move to tax-friendly states.’”
- “California’s tax and regulatory policies, the report predicts, ‘will continue to sap its economic vitality,’ while Texas’s ‘pro-growth’ policies will help it ‘maintain its superior economic performance well into the future.’ The clear implication is that California should become more like Texas.”
- “‘Twenty years ago, you could go to Texas, where they had very low taxes, and you would see the difference between there and California,’ Joel Kotkin, executive editor of NewGeography.com and a presidential fellow at Chapman University in Southern California, told the Los Angeles Times this past March. ‘Today, you go to Texas, the roads are no worse, the public schools are not great but are better than or equal to ours, and their universities are good. The bargain between California’s government and the middle class is constantly being renegotiated to the disadvantage of the middle class.'”
Read the whole thing.
Tags: California, Economics, Growth, Taxes, Texas