How shocking, that Republican and Blue Dog governors are pursuing tax policies that punish the working class under the guise of keeping the rich in their states:
When New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was presented with a new state tax on the wealthy, he vetoed it. He said:
"You're not going to fix this tax situation by continuing to load more and more taxes onto people who have both the ability to leave the state and the inclination to leave the state if they feel as if they are being treated unfairly."
It's not just Christie. Democratic governors in New York and Maryland recently dropped extra taxes on the wealthy from their budgets, citing the same concerns.
But two new studies show there is little evidence that the rich flee high-tax states.
"Taxes [have] essentially no impact on causing people to leave a state," says Jeff Thompson, of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
In a study tracking 18 years of migration between states in New England, Thompson found that people mostly move for job-related reasons. They go where the jobs are, regardless of whether it's low-tax New Hampshire or higher-tax Maine.
"If you're living in a state and your tax bill goes up by a thousand or two thousand dollars," he says, "that ... pales in comparison to what it would cost you to actually move. And it might not be worth it to have to be farther away from your job, farther away from your friends."
