So I wonder about this: States like Texas and Florida have people moving into them, and California has people moving out of it. I haven't even bothered to fact check that beyond looking briefly and seeing that it's not laughably false, but I wonder if the hard-Republican states tend to have falling value-of-everything values, which mean people in states that are doing better economically feel pressure to leave for money reasons, that doesn't exist in the red states. So bottom line people are overall tending to move to the red states.
I don't know any of the economics involved or even if the GOP talking point is true, although it seems sort-of true maybe, but I wonder if something like that is going on.
A primary reason Texas has people moving in to avoid taxes. Texas has no State income tax.
This is turn means other taxes are higher to compensate, just like States with no sales taxes, or property taxes, etc. The money to run things has to come from somewhere, if spread out across multiple tax sources then each individual source is a smaller percentage. If you remove one of those tax sources, then others will need to be higher to compensate.
People don't think about that though, they just see that there's a specific tax missing and think they'll have fewer taxes taken overall. Which could be true, or not depending on how the state's tax revenue is structured and if own property that has a higher tax rate. For instance, gas taxes on fuel may be higher, and if you have a vehicle with poor mileage, you'll be paying more than you would otherwise. But most people aren't paying attention to the "hidden" taxes that are just embedded in everyday prices. Do you know what the tax rate added to a gallon of fuel is in your State? I doubt it. But you probably know what the sales tax rate is, or close enough to estimate for purchases at least.
To be honest, TX probably has fairly low fuel taxes though since they have a massive oil business, but the example applies to most sales taxes, regardless of the type of sale/purchase it is.
I was gonna say, it's usually the property taxes that make up a significant part of the difference.
Which in turn also means higher rent charges by landlords, so renting doesn't even really mean you avoid it, it's again just obfuscated in a different payment so you don't see it.
Those are always cherry picked to state whatever the viewer believes. The truth is that states just have lots of people moving between them all the time. The Census bureau states that California has one of the lowest in-migration rates of the whole country, but of course that’s a rate, so it’s a percentage of population. Or you can word it that California has tens of thousands of people moving out of the state since their out-migration rate is also lower than other states.
Turns out people just move a lot and they like to move where other people already are.
Yeah, I sort of suspected that it might be something like that. Like I say I never really attempted to get to the bottom of it to see if it was even true statistics.