Post by @infobeautiful@vis.social

@PizzaDemon@mastodon.online · 55 seconds ago

@infobeautiful Washington doesn't have state income tax.

For tax year 2028 there will be tax on income over $1 million per year.

@infobeautiful Data taken from 2021-22, when there was still a big shift to remote work, so people were leaving expensive places to move to cheaper ones. All I've ever seen regarding that is regret.

Mike Perham

@getalifemike@urbanists.social · 2 hours ago

@infobeautiful this is GOP propaganda. Research shows that people are moving because of high housing prices from NIMBY policies, not taxes.

gjm

@gjm@mathstodon.xyz · 2 hours ago

@infobeautiful There's a bit of rhetorical sleight-of-hand here. I bet that if you plotted a graph of "net migration of _people_ by state" it would look pretty much the same, but having "taxpayers" in the title primes you to look for explanations in terms of taxes. Which are not necessarily correct.

Some comments on this sort of thing from the "Center on Budget and Policy Priorities": https://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/state-taxes-have-a-minimal-impact-on-peoples-interstate-moves which claims that looking carefully at the available evidence shows e.g. that the great majority of interstate migrants are not moving for tax reasons. (That would be consistent with the _net_ migration being driven by taxes. Or with it not being.)

This is from 2023, though I doubt the situation has changed hugely since then. The CBPP is, AIUI, left-leaning but not strongly partisan.

Also possibly relevant: California has about 17M taxpayers, so 831/day is about 1.8% per year.

Anyway. The narrative the WA House Republicans are obviously suggesting here is "red states have lower taxes, blue states have higher taxes, people move from higher-tax states to lower-tax states". But it could equally be, say, "blue states are more prosperous, so they have richer people, so their property prices are higher, and people move to places with cheaper housing". Or "blue states are more urban, red states are more rural, and people are tending to move from cities to more rural places now that remote working is more feasible". Or any number of other things.