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Net domestic immigration July 2020 - July 2024
573 sats \ 8 comments \ @Scoresby 8h charts_and_numbers
I've included the state income tax rate because it's interesting. It seems like the reasons people move aren't just taxes (but they also are probably moving because the taxes are high).
The source article also has some interesting conclusions about taxes and migration.
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271 sats \ 4 replies \ @kepford 6h
This stuff is interesting. The number of times I have heard from someone here in California, "yeah my friend/family member moved out of state" is beyond a number I can count.
I can tell you this. It started with the lock downs in California and its still happening. Some of the people I know that have moved had little logic to their decision and even less planning. It was a gut thing. Some have moved back due to this lack of reason. Others love the move.
I came very close to moving and did a lot of comparative research on many things in different states. But, when push came to shove... as messed up as California is, we have insulated ourselves as much as we can and really our day to day would not be that different (in the positive) and we'd lose a lot of things we love.
We humans tend to think the grass is greener on the other side and don't really consider all the trade-offs of change. Not that we didn't make changes but we didn't migrate. It blows my mind how some people basically move because of the perception of politics. Not the actual things on the ground.
If one lives in Dallas, it is more like Los Angeles than where I live. If you move to rural Tennessee it is VERY different from Nashville. I really love Tennessee and Nashville but a massive factor in where one lives is personal preference.
If you take all of that away though... for me TN would be a large financial bump up. Texas less so due to their stupid high property taxes. I do think its great that people are moving around and maybe making the lizard class rethink the edges of visions. Voting with your feet is a real option in the US. I wish states would exercise more autonomy and make the differences even more stark. In the next decades that could save a lot of bloodshed.
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71 sats \ 1 reply \ @Undisciplined 6h
There's been a move towards increased federalism this century: marijuana, abortion, gay marriage (until the Supreme Court intervened), gun laws, gambling, smoking, trans stuff, etc.
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42 sats \ 0 replies \ @kepford 5h
As it should be.
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59 sats \ 1 reply \ @SimpleStacker 4h
I had a friend move to Texas during the lockdowns. I was very tempted to as well. We even visited them and looked at houses together.
Ultimately, we decided not to. "I don't want to move because of politics," was my ultimate reasoning. Despite the annoyance of living in California, it's still where our community is. You can't rebuild that easily. And of course, the weather.
Three years later my friend decided to move back.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @kepford 4h
I would move if the politics meant that it affected me negatively enough. And I could solve that by moving and all the tradeoffs worked.
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204 sats \ 2 replies \ @Undisciplined 6h
There's a decent amount of academic work on this. IIRC, a one percentage point increase in a tax rate (sales, property, income, etc) causes about a 3% increase in migration probability. Migration probability is quite low, though, something like 3% per year.
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42 sats \ 1 reply \ @Scoresby OP 5h
It probably is very messy. States with high taxes are also likely to have onerous regulations and busy body politics.
The article also points out that Alaska has a low tax rate but a lot of emigration. Apparently, it's cold and most people don't like being eaten by a bear when they go for a run.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined 4h
It is messy, but there are lots of empirical strategies to deal with it.
One of the simplest is the idea that changes explain changes: i.e. Alaska has always been cold and full of bears, so that can't be the reason people are now moving away.
For the impact of taxes, you'd look at how migration patterns change after a tax change.
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