A lesson lost on Democrats.

Fade

Fade

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Millionaires Go Missing

Quote
"Maryland couldn't balance its budget last year, so the state tried to close the shortfall by fleecing the wealthy. Politicians in Annapolis created a millionaire tax bracket, raising the top marginal income-tax rate to 6.25%. And because cities such as Baltimore and Bethesda also impose income taxes, the state+local tax rate can go as high as 9.45%. Governor Martin O'Malley, a dedicated class warrior, declared that these richest 0.3% of filers were "willing and able to pay their fair share." The Baltimore Sun predicted the rich would "grin and bear it."

One year later, nobody's grinning. One-third of the millionaires have disappeared from Maryland tax rolls. In 2008 roughly 3,000 million-dollar income tax returns were filed by the end of April. This year there were 2,000, which the state comptroller's office concedes is a "substantial decline." On those missing returns, the government collects 6.25% of nothing. Instead of the state coffers gaining the extra $106 million the politicians predicted, millionaires paid $100 million less in taxes than they did last year -- even at higher rates."

No doubt the majority of that loss in millionaire filings results from the recession. However, this is one reason that depending on the rich to finance government is so ill-advised: Progressive tax rates create mountains of cash during good times that vanish during recessions. For evidence, consult California, New York and New Jersey.

The Maryland state revenue office says it's "way too early" to tell how many millionaires moved out of the state when the tax rates rose. But no one disputes that some rich filers did leave. It's easier than the redistributionists think. Christopher Summers, president of the Maryland Public Policy Institute, notes: "Marylanders with high incomes typically own second homes in tax friendlier states like Florida, Delaware, South Carolina and Virginia. So it's easy for them to change their residency."

All of this means that the burden of paying for bloated government in Annapolis will fall on the middle class. Thanks to the futility of soaking the rich, these working families will now pay Mr. O'Malley's "fair share."
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And now that Obama is going to stick it to the rich in every state, I see a mass migration of rich folks from high tax rate states like California, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, and Minnesota to states that have NO STATE INCOME TAX like Alaska, New Hampshire, Tennessee, Florida, South Dakota, Washington, Nevada, Texas, and Wyoming to help recoup "their fair share" of the tax money the Democrats think they are entitled to.

Heck, a Calif. millionaire can move next door to Nevada and save almost a million dollars in ten years.
 
Fade said:
Quote
"No doubt the majority of that loss in millionaire filings results from the recession."
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No doubt. Or perhaps Maryland's influence is so terrifying that 30% of billionaires leave the planet to find lower tax planets to live on, presumably.


Yes, some millionaires and billionaires are cold calculating miserly penny pinchers, but there are plenty of others who understand that having all that money means they can live as and where they like. - and where they live tends to be where they WANT to. A little rise in tax is as likely to stop them from living in a place as 3% hike in a cable bill is to make people give up cable. There's an effect, but it's small. As the article you quoted accurately stated, most of the missing millionaires are because the kind of wealth they had and depended upon was the fictional paper wealth that just imploded back to its true intrinsic value.

On the other hand, if there had been a heavy tax on imaginary wealth there would have been more motivation to create real wealth instead of paper and we'd all be a lot better off. Oh, but we so loved the illusion of riches.
 
WSJ a piece of work that is an opinion not fact. Yet the Republicans feel convinced this somehow proves them right. It's a Letter to the Editor with little to no basis in reality. Move along...
 
faethor didn't want you to pay attention so he said:
It's a Letter to the Editor with little to no basis in reality. Move along...
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Yes do move along. You wouldn't want to read something from a lowly person that would have the gall to write to the editor.

Move along to some folks that have the real skinny on how increased taxes affect things. Heck they even have examples for you faethor.

Some examples:
*Updating some research from Richard Vedder of Ohio University, we found that from 1998 to 2007, more than 1,100 people every day including Sundays and holidays moved from the nine highest income-tax states such as California, New Jersey, New York and Ohio and relocated mostly to the nine tax-haven states with no income tax, including Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire and Texas. We also found that over these same years the no-income tax states created 89% more jobs and had 32% faster personal income growth than their high-tax counterparts.

Did the greater prosperity in low-tax states happen by chance? Is it coincidence that the two highest tax-rate states in the nation, California and New York, have the biggest fiscal holes to repair? No. Dozens of academic studies -- old and new -- have found clear and irrefutable statistical evidence that high state and local taxes repel jobs and businesses.

*Martin Feldstein, Harvard economist and former president of the National Bureau of Economic Research, co-authored a famous study in 1998 called "Can State Taxes Redistribute Income?" This should be required reading for today's state legislators. It concludes: "Since individuals can avoid unfavorable taxes by migrating to jurisdictions that offer more favorable tax conditions, a relatively unfavorable tax will cause gross wages to adjust. . . . A more progressive tax thus induces firms to hire fewer high skilled employees and to hire more low skilled employees."

*More recently, Barry W. Poulson of the University of Colorado last year examined many factors that explain why some states grew richer than others from 1964 to 2004 and found "a significant negative impact of higher marginal tax rates on state economic growth." In other words, soaking the rich doesn't work. To the contrary, middle-class workers end up taking the hit.

*Finally, there is the issue of whether high-income people move away from states that have high income-tax rates. Examining IRS tax return data by state, E.J. McMahon, a fiscal expert at the Manhattan Institute, measured the impact of large income-tax rate increases on the rich ($200,000 income or more) in Connecticut, which raised its tax rate in 2003 to 5% from 4.5%; in New Jersey, which raised its rate in 2004 to 8.97% from 6.35%; and in New York, which raised its tax rate in 2003 to 7.7% from 6.85%. Over the period 2002-2005, in each of these states the "soak the rich" tax hike was followed by a significant reduction in the number of rich people paying taxes in these states relative to the national average. Amazingly, these three states ranked 46th, 49th and 50th among all states in the percentage increase in wealthy tax filers in the years after they tried to soak the rich.
 
Fade said:
Yes do move along. You wouldn't want to read something from a lowly person that would have the gall to write to the editor.

? No. Dozens of academic studies -- old and new -- have found clear and irrefutable statistical evidence that high state and local taxes repel jobs and businesses.
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:roflmao:
You live in Florida right? What is the growth in Flordia? Is it the business wealthy class? No it's old and retired. Sure they want to keep on to their existing wealth and they are not working, read not generatoring wealth. They move for less snow. Look where the profit centers are in US, hint it's not Arizona.
 
@ faethor
"You live in Florida right?"
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Nope, that's Red.
I'm down here where they're still building cars for the time being. :shocked:
Look under my avatar.

Edit
I see you still didn't want to address the findings of Richard Vedder of Ohio University, or Martin Feldstein, Harvard economist and former president of the National Bureau of Economic Research, or Barry W. Poulson of the University of Colorado or E.J. McMahon, fiscal expert at the Manhattan Institute.

That's OK, I wouldn't want you to get confused by facts. Opinions are so much easier to argue against.
 
Fade said:
I see you still didn't want to address the findings of Richard Vedder of Ohio University, or Martin Feldstein, Harvard economist and former president of the National Bureau of Economic Research, or Barry W. Poulson of the University of Colorado or E.J. McMahon, fiscal expert at the Manhattan Institute.

That's OK, I wouldn't want you to get confused by facts. Opinions are so much easier to argue against.
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Cherry picking quotes from authority it is false to assume all authority is correct. No one claimed authorities hadn't written papers. They always do. Now how or if those paper are accepted as accurate well.

And of course we know economics is one of the most politicized branches of college education. If the riches moved to low tax states Alaska would be booming. Their total tax is 6.4% the lowest in the nation. And of course their 'Republican' governer made sure that the state had take from businesses and sent people checks to live there. (Yeah a real conservative. :roll: )
 
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