John Hinderaker at
Power Line has a really good
piece comparing California and Texas; California being a high-tax state and Texas being a low-tax state. One of the key points is internal migration, CA is losing people while TX is gaining them. He quotes William Voegeli in the
Los Angeles Times:Between April 1, 2000, and June 30, 2007, an average of 3,247 more people moved out of California than into it every week, according to the Census Bureau. Over the same period, Texas had a net weekly population increase of 1,544 as a result of people moving in from other states. During these years, more generally, 16 of the 17 states with the lowest tax levels had positive "net internal migration," in the Census Bureau's language, while 14 of the 17 states with the highest taxes had negative net internal migration.
And so Hinderaker concludes the following:
Texas, increasingly, is the economic and intellectual leader of the U.S. During the last 18 months before the current recession took hold, while the country as a whole was still creating jobs, more than half of those jobs were created in a single state: Texas. Texas has usurped the leadership position that, decades ago, belonged to California. Today California is in decline, likely irreversibly so.
Projecting current trends into the indefinite future is a sucker bet, but that is the way things look today.
