. . . high tax burdens don't. There are a lot of ways to prove this proposition. One of the most ingenious is by Tavis H. Brown, a Missouri political consultant, in "How Money Walks," a collection of essays by him and like-minded writers.
Using IRS data, he looks state-by-state at how aggregate individual income went up or down between 1995 and 2010. Texas, for instance, gained $22.1 billion while California lost $33.8 billion.
Mr. Travis says stunning amounts of aggregate income "walked," away from the high-tax states to the low-tax states.
If you are losing your working wealth to other states, you are losing your most precious cargo. These are your earners, your workers . . .
. . . your entrepreneurs . . . . This great great movement of working wealth into and out of states is staggering and has serious economic ramifications.
The book has more charts and lists than most of us have time to digest. Two that interested me are lists of the ten states with the greatest net gains in adjusted gross income and the ten states with the greatest net losses.
Texas is no. 3 on the list of winners.
Five of the top-ten states rank 40 or lower in national tax burden. The highest tax burden of any top-ten state is ranked 17th. Five of the ten have a state income-tax burden of zero percent.
Six of the bottom-ten states rank 10 or higher. The lowest tax burden from this cohort is 20th. The lowest top income-tax rate is 3.07 percent in Pennsylvania, which is to say that all the bottom-ten states tax their citizens' income.
Okay. Correlation does not prove causation. But correlation surely can point in the direction of causation. What else might explain why low-tax states are doing well and high-tax states are not? Speak up.
Leftists cannot argue with the numbers. The best thing they can say is that income growth ain't everything: that the detriments of living in New York, California, or Illinois -- the big three -- are more than offset by the benfits; that taxpayers there get their money's worth.
Except that leftists, by and large, don't say that. They either don't know about the problem or simply don't care about it.
Case in point: the Houston Chronicle, which regularly urges Texas to be more like California and less like Texas.
Here are the top-ten states, according to Mr. Brown's figures: 1. Florida, 2. Arizona, 3. Texas, 4. North Carolina, 5. Nevada, 6. South Carolina, 7. Georgia, 8. Colorado, 9. Washington, and 10. Tennessee. As a group, Brown says, they gained a staggering $2.25 trillion in adjusted gross income over his fifteen-year test period.
The top-ten losers are 1. California, 2. New York, 3. Illinois, 4. New Jersey, 5. Ohio, 6. Michigan, 7. Massachusetts, 8. Pennsylvania, 9. Maryland, and 10. Connecticut. Collectively, says Mr. Brown, they lost $198 billion.
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Diana and I met Mr. Brown in Scotland last September. Here is Unca D's photo portrait of him. And here is a portrait of his colleague and wife, Rachael Keller Brown. And here is the site for their consultancy.
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One of Unca D's great-great-grandparents was Mary Elizabeth Brown (1822-1880), who died in Perry County, Missouri, home to some of Mr. Brown's ancestors.
Are we cousins? I like to think so, but his records and mine, alas, peter out before reaching a common ancestor, if there is one. So I've adopted him as an honorary cousin. He certainly thinks right.
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