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Taxes Not Seen as Making the Rich Flee New York
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| Contributor | RP |
| Last Edited | RP Mar 19, 2009 10:01pm |
| Category | Analysis |
| News Date | Mar 18, 2009 09:00pm |
| Description | It is perhaps the most potent argument offered by those who oppose increasing the income tax on wealthy New Yorkers: If you raise it, they will flee.
Yet there is surprisingly little evidence to support the proposition that rich New Yorkers would bolt if forced to pay higher income taxes. Though tracking the movement of wealthy taxpayers from state to state is difficult, experts on public finance and migration say they have yet to document a substantial “rich drain” in states that have raised income taxes in recent years.
“At the level we’re talking about, there’s no quantitative evidence that it affects the mobility decisions of affluent taxpayers,” said Douglas S. Massey, a demographer at Princeton University and president of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.
But even experts who oppose such taxes on other grounds — out of fear that they will retard economic growth and innovation, or encourage lawmakers to indulge in bouts of new spending — concede that there is not much evidence that raising taxes on the wealthy would drive out a significant number. |
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