Why New Yorkers are abandoning the state

Betsy McCaughey:

The US Census Bureau announced last week that New York slipped to fourth place in population among the 50 states.

Though babies are still born here every day, and immigrants still flock in, overall population growth lags because New Yorkers are abandoning the state.

Don’t blame the weather. Blustery Montana and North Dakota aren’t having this problem. New Yorkers are escaping high taxes and dismal job growth.

Other high-tax states like Illinois and New Jersey, which has the country’s second-highest tax burden, are also hemorrhaging residents. Families are uprooting and moving to places with lower taxes, more growth and fossil-fuel-friendly policies.

In the November elections, voters in Illinois expelled their high-tax incumbent Democratic governor, Pat Quinn, while voters in Massachusetts and Maryland rebuked tax-and-spend Democrats by putting the governor’s seat in GOP hands.

Not so in New York, where incumbent Democrat Andrew Cuomo easily won a second term against his Republican challenger, Rob Astorino.

Cuomo has tweaked the state’s tax policies by lowering the corporate-income-tax rate from 7.1 percent to 6.5 percent, exempting more assets from the death tax and temporarily capping annual increases in property taxes.

But none of these minor changes has moved the economic needle. According to the latest state Labor Department data, job growth in New York is half the national average.

Astorino put forward a bold tax-cut plan, but got nowhere. Instead, New Yorkers are voting with their feet.

So are New Jerseyans. Despite having a Republican governor, they’re among the most taxed Americans, and nearly 200,000 decamped in the last four years in search of a better deal.

As Arthur Laffer, Steve Moore and co-authors have shown in their book, “The Wealth of States,” high taxes depress job growth, while states with zero or low income taxes outpace the others in job growth decade after decade.

New Jersey was a high-growth state until it added an income tax in 1976.
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In short they left because liberalism and high taxes suck.

People are leaving California too for the same reason.  It is not the weather, it is the taxes and the burdensome regulations.  It is a lesson for the country as a whole.