Aug
1
2024

Burning Question: Why Would Rich People Move to Maine?

Well, that's just one question raised by this tweet's chart:

Chris Edwards' tweet points to his blog post at Cato. Key point:

The figure ranks migration ratios for households earning more than $200,000. Of the 9 states that do not have individual income taxes, 7 of them are in the top 15 states for in-migration (Florida, Tennessee, South Dakota, Nevada, New Hampshire, Wyoming, and Texas). Only 3 states in the top 15 have above-average tax burdens (Delaware, Maine, and Vermont).

At the other end, high-tax Illinois is losing more than two high-earning households for every one that it gains. States such as Illinois, California, Minnesota, New Jersey, and New York have been losing high earners for years, which is undermining their economies. Yet, as explored in Cato’s new Fiscal Report Card to be released in October, governors in these states seem oblivious to the talent drain their high-tax policies are causing.

I imagine those rich people winding up in Maine and Vermont saying "I meant to go to New Hampshire, but I asked some geezer for directions, and he said 'You can't get theah from heah,' so…"

I also tried to imagine mutated dialog from Casablanca:

"What in heaven's name brought you to Maine?"

"My finances. I came to Maine for the low taxes."

"Low taxes? What low taxes? Maine has a top marginal income tax rate of 7.15%, a 5.5% sales tax, an estate tax, …"

"I was misinformed."

The blog post also looks at migration ratios for age 65+ households. New Hampshire's high there too, but so is Maine. Vermont is much lower on that chart.

Also of note:

  • Why would he worry about that now? Madeleine Kearns, now working at Bari Weiss's Free Press, notes a minor problem: Biden’s Supreme Court Reforms Are Unconstitutional.

    On Monday, President Biden proposed two reforms to the Supreme Court—term limits for justices and a binding ethics code—along with a constitutional amendment to its recent presidential-immunity decision. Making his case in a Washington Post op-ed, the president claimed broad support and specifically thanked “the bipartisan Presidential Commission on the [SCOTUS] for its insightful analysis, which informed some of these proposals.”

    But there’s a problem with Biden trying to use the commission to give his proposals legitimacy. Adam White, who served as a member of that commission, tells The Free Press that “nothing in our report actually recommended anything” that the president is now proposing.

    Imposing term limits by statute would be unconstitutional, says White, a legal scholar for the American Enterprise Institute who was one of 34 experts who delivered a report on Supreme Court reforms to Biden in 2021.

    Biden also proposed "a binding ethics code", even more problematic, separation-of-powers-wise. I'll note that there's a perfectly Constitutional remedy for misbehaving judges: impeachment. All it takes is a simple majority House vote, and a ⅔ vote in the Senate, and he or she is outta there.

    This is much less onerous than amending the Constitution, which takes a ⅔ vote in both House and Senate, plus ¾ of the states ratifying.

    (This has been your civics lesson du jour.)

  • Some bedtime reading? Maybe not, if you get upset by tales of unaccountable bureaucrats imposing costs on you. The Competitive Enterprise Institute's 2024 edition of Ten Thousand Commandments is out now.

    The federal government has a spending budget that the public can see. Every year Congress allocates a certain amount of money to each agency, and often for specific programs within each agency. All of this is published online, with data going back to the last century. By contrast, there is no centralized budget document for federal regulatory costs. Federal regulations cost an estimated $2.1 trillion per year, based largely on the data agencies bother to disclose. That’s more than $15,000 per year for the average household. Why so little accountability?

    That is why CEI’s Wayne Crews puts together the annual Ten Thousand Commandments report. He does what the government won’t. Right now, data on the number of regulations, how much they cost, and which rulemaking agencies are most active are scattered across dozens of sources.

    Just noting the perverse incentives for those bureaucrats: if they ain't producing more regulations, they ain't doin' their jobs!

  • Can't wait for the movie. Jonah Goldberg writes on Trump, Vance, and the Greenland Effect.

    I belong to a small group of people who think America should peacefully acquire Greenland. It’s an old idea. The State Department pitched buying the vast arctic island in 1946, but the Danes didn’t want to sell their colony, alas. But given its strategic and economic value, it’s worth revisiting.

    When it was reported in 2019 that then-President Trump was interested in the scheme, it immediately became a punchline.

    Of course, buying Greenland was always going to be a heavy lift politically, but Trump’s embrace made it infinitely heavier.

    The Greenland effect doesn’t just apply to obscure and quirky good ideas, but also to good—or simply popular—ones. As president, when Trump embraced a policy, that policy became less popular. Despite his anti-immigration rhetoric, support for increased immigration reached an all-time high. He made free trade more popular than ever as well while he started a trade war with China.

    Jonah makes the sage observation that Trumpism only works (barely) for Trump. Candidates that try to imitate his loose-cannon reality-challenged style go on to lose elections. How this ties to the Greenland Effect… well, check it out if you can.

  • I know you are, but what am I? Seriously, dude, what am I? Liz Wolfe's daily news roundup at Reason takes a look at The Schoolyard Taunt Election. Concentrating on the whole "weird" thing we examined yesterday:

    Does the "weird" line make any sense? Admittedly, it is a little weird for Vance and some of his fellow Republicans to express such blatant contempt for other people's life choices—particularly childless and single women, not their male counterparts who are surely also to blame (unless they're busy with the couches, in which case: ride on). But I wonder whether Democrats are taking a premature victory lap, claiming the schoolyard insult is effective, when they're not exactly the party of normal, well-adjusted people like Walz.

    It's the Democrats who can claim Sam Brinton, the crossdressing, gender-fluid, lipstick-wearing Biden administration Energy Department official who kept stealing suitcases (containing clothes and makeup) from luggage conveyor belts at airports. It's the Democrats who currently have gentle-parenting Instagram lady experts using kindergarten-teacher talk to condescend to people worried about big-government regulatory policy. It's the Democrats who have spent a LOT of the last decade holding drag queen story hours at public libraries and expecting everyone to stay really calm about it, and who have promoted an awful lot of gender-doesn't-exist/gender-isn't-binary talk. It's the Democrats, in the form of teachers unions, who held protests with coffins to combat school-reopening plans during COVID-19, implying that they would die if expected to go to work (while schools stayed open in much of Scandinavia, to great effect). Don't even get me started on the fixation with white-lady tears, or the literal Hamas headbands detected on some college campuses this spring.

    Ach, we got three more months of this?