Study: Taxes Don’t Drive Out the California Rich
31st October 2012
Note that this study only looked at tax return data — so any income that didn’t make it onto the tax returns was effectively invisible.
The research showed that millionaires not only were unmoved, so to speak, by their taxes being raised, “the highest-income Californians were less likely to leave the state after the millionaire tax was passed,” wrote Charles Varner and Cristobal Young in their report.
In fact, the richer the Californian, the more likely he or she was to stay, the study found. Nor did the data suggest that lowering taxes lured millionaires to the state.
Which merely goes to prove my theory that a lot of rich people don’t mind a high tax rate (note that I didn’t say ‘paying high taxes’, which is a different thing entirely) because it hits the almost-rich even harder, and tends to increase effective income inequality rather than reduce it. California is like New York City, a very pleasant place for those who don’t have to count their change.
November 1st, 2012 at 10:34
Oh, so now you’re interested in income inequality?
But only as it relates to the rich and the almost-rich, now as it relates to the rich and almost-rich vis-a-vis the middle class. Curious.
And of course, not a peep regarding how this flies in the face of your contention that taxing the rich will make them move…
And ‘income that didn’t make it onto the tax returns’is moot. The study was about how taxes affect migration; monies not appearing on the tax return are a priori not subject to tax, and so are outside the scope of the study.
November 1st, 2012 at 10:35
Correction: *not as*