Voting With Your Feet
Peg on Feb 13 2008 at 4:38 am | Filed under: Domestic Politics, Economics, Peg's Page
One of my liberal friends routinely rails at me for being such a selfish, uncaring conservative.
When I remind him, though, that he is the one who moved from Minnesota to Florida because he “could not afford the taxes” in his former home state, and I am the one who remains here - I hear mumbling about temperatures and golf. (With temps seemingly stuck in the “your-nose-will-freeze-and-fall-off-your-face-if-you-go-out-for-more-than-three-minutes” range, I’ll give him the temperature argument.)
People do move for weather and sports, for culture and family. Nevertheless, if you look at the data, clearly some percentage of people move because they judge it costs them just too damn much to live in their high tax state.
We invite readers to visit the U-Haul Moving Company Web site (www.uhaul.com), where you can type in a pair of U.S. cities to learn what it costs to move from point A to B. If you want to move, say, from Austin, Texas to Southern California, the moving van will cost you $407 to rent. But if you want to move out of California to Austin, the same van costs $1,831. A move from Dallas to Philadelphia costs $663, versus $2,433 to swap homes in the other direction. The biggest discrepancy we could find was $557 from Nashville, Tennessee to Los Angeles, but the trip costs nearly eight times more, or $4,285, to move to Nashville from L.A.
I’m someone who believes in fiscal responsibility. You need reasonable services to have a pleasant and safe community, and you need some taxation to pay for those services and safety. Politicians should remember these words of wisdom, however:
Sphere: Related ContentOur friends on the left say Americans are willing to pay more taxes to get better government services, but their migration patterns reveal the opposite. Governors would be wise to heed these interstate migration trends as they try to cope with what may be one of the worst years in recent memory for state finances. The people who tend to be the most mobile in American society are the educated and motivated — in other words, the taxpaying class. Tax them too much, and you’ll soon find they aren’t there to tax at all.
“The biggest discrepancy we could find was $557 from Nashville, Tennessee to Los Angeles, but the trip costs nearly eight times more, or $4,285, to move to Nashville from L.A.”
For some reason, we are getting a lot of LA expats here in Nashville. Some are obviously music people, but it’s wider than that.
Of course, part of it is simply that Nashville is a very nice city to live in.