Glenn Reynolds: If you tax it too much, they will go Are America's tax migrants bringing California and New York's high-tax views to sunny low-tax shores of Texas and Florida?

Glenn Harlan Reynolds | USA TODAY

The world is in the grip of a vast migration. Seeking a better life for themselves and their families, people are abandoning their benighted homelands and moving to places that offer them more opportunity. But are they bringing their homelands’ problems with them?

No, I’m not talking about Mexicans coming to the United States, or Middle Easterners and Africans flooding into Europe. I’m talking about Americans moving from blue states to red states.

IRS data show that taxpayers are migrating from high-tax states like New York, Illinois, and California to low-tax states like Texas and Florida. And it’s not just sports stars or star scientists, doing that, but fairly ordinary people — though, of course, people who earn enough money to pay taxes. If you’re living on welfare benefits and don't plan to change that, you won’t move to a low-tax state to escape taxes; if you move anywhere, it’ll probably be to a state that offers better benefits than the one you live in now.

This phenomenon has numerous implications, but let’s talk about two: In time, if taxpayers tend to migrate from high-tax states to low-tax states, and if people receiving government benefits tend to stay in place or migrate from lower-benefit states to higher-benefit states, then over time lower-tax states will tend to accumulate more people with high earnings, while higher-benefit states will tend to accumulate more people who live on the dole.

It gets worse, of course, if high-benefits states are also high-tax states (as is often the case) since then states with high benefits will accumulate more people who draw on them, while shedding the taxpayers they need to support them.

The problem is that the result isn’t stable: High-tax, high-benefit states will eventually go bankrupt because they won’t retain enough taxpayers to support their welfare spending. And, in fact, that’s the direction that California, New York, and especially Illinois seem to be heading, even as places like Texas and Florida flourish.

There are two things that might get in the way here. One is that high-tax, high-benefit states might lower their taxes and reduce their benefits. That does happen, though it’s difficult: Politicians extract a lot of power from high taxes (and from selectively reducing high taxes for favored constituencies) and high benefits are an effective way of buying votes. Generally, the situation has to be absolutely desperate (think Greece) before they’ll change.

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The other thing that might happen is that the migrants from high tax states might bring their political attitudes with them, moving to new, low-tax states for the economic opportunity but then supporting the same policies that ruined the states they left. This seems quite plausible, alas, and I’ve heard Coloradans lament that the flow of Californians to their state involved a lot of people doing just that. (I suppose that migrants from lower-benefits states to higher-benefits states might support change the other way, but people who live on the dole seem to have pretty similar voting patterns regardless of location, which is why the dole is so popular with certain politicians).

If I were one of those conservative billionaires (hello, Koch brothers! hi, Sheldon Adelson!) who are always donating tens of millions to support Republican candidates, I think I might try spending some of the money on something more useful: A sort of welcome wagon for blue state migrants to red states. Something that would explain to them why the place they’re moving to is doing better than the place they left, and suggesting that they might not want to vote for the same policies that are driving their old home states into bankruptcy.

Would it work? I don’t know. But it’s likely to be more useful than money thrown down the political-consultant rat hole. And if nothing else, it might spread a bit of economic literacy, which is always in short supply.

At any rate, if your state is losing taxpayers, it might be time for it to get its act together. And if it’s gaining them, it might be a good idea to remember why that is, and not change.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor, is the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself, and a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.

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