Millionaire Tax Pushes Celtics Forward to Texas
9th July 2023
The Athletic has an interview with Boston Celtics forward Grant Williams about his decision to move to the Dallas Mavericks: “In Boston, it’s really like $48 million with the millionaire’s tax, so $54 million in Dallas is really like $58 million in Boston and $63 million in L.A.”
The Boston Herald noticed this and headlined it “Millionaire’s Tax helped push Celtic forward to Dallas Mavericks.”
This is a nicely concrete example of the effects of this tax in pushing talent out of Massachusetts and in increasing the cost of Massachusetts employers to retain talent. It was entirely predictable—opponents of the tax predicted that this would be the effect, as it has been when other states adopted similar measures. Yet the voters in Massachusetts narrowly approved the millionaire’s tax anyway in November 2022 after a fraudulent union-backed mail campaign. The new 4 percent tax in the Bay State comes on top of the 5 percent that is already in place, bringing the total marginal state income tax rate to 9 percent.
July 11th, 2023 at 17:44
Tim…
Here’s George Harrison on the Taxman song:
“I had discovered I was paying a huge amount of money to the taxman,” he once explained in interview. “You are so happy that you’ve finally started earning money – and then you find out about tax. In those days we paid nineteen shillings and sixpence out of every pound (there were twenty shillings in the pound), and with supertax and surtax and tax-tax it was ridiculous – a heavy penalty to pay for making money…It was, and still is, typical. Why should this be so? Are we being punished for something we have forgotten to do?…That was the big turn-off for Britain. Anybody who ever made any money moved to America or somewhere else.”
Regards,
Debby
July 12th, 2023 at 18:40
Unlike the U.S., Britain doesn’t tax their people when they live abroad, which is why most every prominent Brit musician lives overseas — hence the phrase ‘tax exile’. The income tax is a great tool for creatomg Republicans out of professional athletes; when a guy gets a million dollar signing bonus and only receives a check for $650k, he becomes libertarian very quickly.