Oregon’s Millionaire Tax
21st December 2010
The Wall Street Journal has an editorial about how Oregon’s tax increase to 11% on individual income above $500,000 a year has produced far less revenue than projected. The paper calls it “an instant replay of what happened in Maryland in 2008 when the legislature in Annapolis instituted a millionaire tax. There roughly one-third of the state’s millionaire households vanished from the tax rolls after rates went up.”
My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.
December 23rd, 2010 at 19:02
Unfortunately, both the WSJ’s editorial on Oregon and its assertion about what happened in Maryland are outright lies.
See straightforward exposes of the Oregon piece at http://www.itepnet.org/pdf/or_wsjmigration_1210.pdf, and of the Maryland “one-third statistics at http://www.itepnet.org/pdf/Preserve-MD-Millionaires-Tax.pdf .
Bottom line: the WSJ editorial guys knew the “one-third” stat was wrong, backed away from it in a subsequent editorial, and eventually just sort of forgot that they’d been wrong in the first place.
But on both the Maryland thing and the Oregon thing, they are demonstrably just wrong.
December 24th, 2010 at 07:03
There is an unfortunate tendency on all sides of tax and income questions to treat the tranches into which taxpayers and income-earners are put for analysis purposes as being fixed over time, and nothing could be further from the truth. I enjoy reading articles by authors who understand that, no, these things change, sometimes rapidly. It keeps the rest of us honest … mostly.