Posted on 10/31/2013 12:03:58 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Critics charge that Texas’s growth depends on the oil and gas industries and is weighted toward low-wage jobs. But in fact, Texas’s low-tax, light-regulation policies have produced a highly diversified economy that from 2002 to 2011 created nearly one-third of the nation’s highest-paying jobs. In those years, its number of upper- and middle-income jobs grew 24 percent.
Where are Americans moving, and why? Timothy Noah, writing in the Washington Monthly, professes to be puzzled. He points out that people have been moving out of states with high per capita incomes -- Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, Maryland -- to states with lower income levels.
“Why are Americans by and large moving away from economic opportunity rather than toward it?” he asks.
Actually, it's not puzzling at all. The movement from high-tax, high-housing-cost states to low-tax, low-housing-cost states has been going on for more than 40 years, as I note in my new book Shaping Our Nation: How Surges of Migration Transformed America and Its Politics.
Between 1970 and 2010 the population of New York state increased from 18 million to 19 million. In that same period, the population of Texas increased from 11 million to 25 million.
The picture is even starker if you look at major metro areas. The New York metropolitan area, including counties in New Jersey and Connecticut, increased from 17.8 million in 1970 to 19.2 million in 2010 — up 8 percent. During that time the nation grew 52 percent.
In the same period, the four big metro areas in Texas — Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Austin — grew from 6 million to 15.6 million, a 160 percent increase.
Contrary to Noah’s inference, people don’t move away from opportunity. They move partly in response to economic incentives, but also to pursue dreams and escape nightmares.
Opportunity does exist in the Northeastern states and in California — for people with very high skill levels. And for low-skill immigrants, without whom those metro areas would have lost rather than gained population over the last three decades.
But there’s not much opportunity there for people with midlevel skills who want to raise families. Housing costs are exceedingly high, partly, as Noah notes, because of restrictive land use and zoning regulations.
And central city public schools, with a few exceptions, repel most middle-class parents.
High taxes produce revenues to finance handsome benefits and pensions for public employee union members in the high-cost states. It’s hard to see how this benefits middle-class people making their livings in the private sector.
Moreover, Noah’s use of per capita incomes is misleading, since children typically have no income and many in the Northeast and coastal California are childless. If you look at household incomes, these states are far closer to the national average.
As economist Tyler Cowen points out in a Time magazine cover story, when you adjust incomes for tax rates and cost of living, Texas comes out ahead of California and New York and ranks behind only Virginia and Washington state (which like Texas has no state income tax).
Critics charge that Texas’s growth depends on the oil and gas industries and is weighted toward low-wage jobs. But in fact, Texas’s low-tax, light-regulation policies have produced a highly diversified economy that from 2002 to 2011 created nearly one-third of the nation’s highest-paying jobs. In those years, its number of upper- and middle-income jobs grew 24 percent.
Liberals like Noah often decry income inequality. But the states with the most unequal incomes and highest poverty levels these days are California and New York. That’s what happens when high taxes and housing costs squeeze out the middle class.
As Noah notes, “Few working-class people earn enough money to live anywhere near San Francisco.”
This leaves a highly visible and articulate upper class willing, in line with their liberal beliefs, to shoulder high tax burdens and a very much larger lower class, many of them immigrants, available to serve them in restaurants, landscape their gardens and valet-park their cars.
There’s nothing wrong with living in a high-rise, restaurant-studded, subway-served neighborhood (I do). It’s great that America offers more such options than one and two generations ago.
But it’s foolish to try to cram everyone into such surroundings, as the Obama Department of Housing and Urban Development (as Terry Eastland reports in the Weekly Standard) and California Governor Jerry Brown are trying to do.
Noah notes correctly that fewer Americans have been moving recently. That’s always true in times of economic distress (the Okies’ trek along U.S. Route 66 to California’s Central Valley in the 1930s was a memorable exception, not the rule).
But they continue to move to the low-tax states that are providing jobs and living space where they can pursue their dreams and escape places that burden them with high costs and provide few middle-class amenities in return.
It’s called “Marxism”.
Karl Marx HATED the middle class. He wanted their blood flowing the streets.
So the middle class is moving out of these Marxist areas to places where capitalism still lives.
And once those middle classers get there, the vote for liberal Marxists thereby compounding the problem....
Liberals no! Stay in the state your ruined!
The sum of the values in circulation can clearly not be augmented by any change in their distribution, any more than the quantity of the precious metals in a country by a Jew selling a Queen Anne’s farthing for a guinea.
- Das Kapital, Chapter Five: Contradictions in the General Formula of Capital
So ..... who did Karl Marx hate?
In the movie White Christmas, Davis (Danny Kaye) tells Wallace (Bing Crosby) that “it would be easier to find a Democrat [in Vermont]” than to find a song & dance team like themselves. Now you can’t find a Republican in Vermont — think Howard Dean as its governor.
And that’s the problem: leftist crap weasels ruin the states in which they live with unbearable taxes, government spending, and regulations, and then move on to free states to repeat the process.
Yeah, but the problem also is the trash leftists all move in these days and start to turn everything into California.
Not a joke...
I agree.
x3
“Why are Americans by and large moving away from economic opportunity rather than toward it?” he asks.
Because they are seeing tax slavery for what it is. In NJ you can own a very average home free & clear, and pay $600+ per month in property taxes for the privilege of living here (mostly for the public schools, which are not good). When your GRANDchildren are no loger in the schools, the state will freeze your property taxes - at $600+ per month. One of our former governors admitted that without illegal immigration, we lost population (and we lost an electoral vote to confirm that). The illegals are immediately on the dole, and the dwindling number of taxpayers get the bill. Since Americans don’t have families anymore, why would one live in an area where you pay so much for others’ kids?
The author mentions “low-skill immigrants”; here in NJ most are illegal, and they contribute nothing. If anyone thought they would save Social Security, note the smallest increase in years at a time when we’ve never had more illegals in this country; they know they are imported to pay for retired Americans, and they ain’t playing ball (while they continue to breed a next generation that Americans won’t).
It’s not all about money. Many of us have moved to states with less regulation.
Many of them are public sector union retirees - teachers, etc - who've moved to more favorable climes (weather-wise/tax-wise) while collecting their generous government pensions from places like Illinois (where the state is financially treading water; where tax rates are driving people and business to places like Texas, as they flee higher taxes imposed by states run by liberals, who have run their economies into the ground).
Texas: lower taxes, less regulation and lawsuit abuse reform = business friendly government.
Same sh*t happened here in Virginia. The scum from DC and Maryland determined their work was done and proceeded to infest this state .. and here we are, with all-but-certain Gov-elect Terry McAuliffe.
I didn’t quite make it that far. I moved to Oklahoma for it’s best in the nation homeschool laws. Texas would be my next choice. In all fairness to Texas, I have to go there to make enough money.
Go after the sponsors of your press that keep working against those opposing Democrats. They cover and advertise for them free and give the equivalent of at least tens of billions a year to the Democrat party.
Go after them in letters and email.
Cut off they food and make them starve till the free press is a unbiased press.
Seriously considering relocating out of Connecticut within the year. Maybe North Carolina or farther south.
“Yeah, but the problem also is the trash leftists all move in these days and start to turn everything into California. Not a joke...”
Nope, no joke for sure. Just look at Colorado. Once a perfectly good conservative stat. Now, a liberal enclave. Others to follow; Nevada, New Mexico, Montana, others. Even Texas is seeing a purpling hue creeping into our state. What to do? Spend more time helping them see the truth conservatism works, liberalism doesn’t.
Ditto!
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