High-tax states are losing people, money and seats in Congress

If the housing supply doesn't match the internal population growth you can have an exodus and an increase in housing prices.

Yes there are other taxes, but the piece focuses entirely on income tax. My point is that there are many factors in where people choose to live, of which cost of living is only a single factor, but this piece lazily focuses solely on a single component of cost of living. It’s thus easy to invalidate its argument that income taxes are what’s causing people to leave.

There are two New Yorks... the NYC Metro and the rest. NYC has adapted, although it is not as diversified as it was. As for the rest, de-industrialization left devastation in the upstate cities, and now whole regions of upstate are depopulating as trade, agricultural and military policies change.

North Carolina is relevant because you can move there and live with marginal skills for now. Taxes aren’t really that low, and will jump as the needs of the population get factored in.

It's fine; we don't need money to buy a clear day in January, just for someone on the internet to assert we don't have any for nature to go "Oh no they didn't."

(full disclosure it is a little cloudy but the sun is definitely out, and it's gorgeous.)

Was just thinking how horrible this would be - there would be no escape.

My biggest challenge with the idea of governments printing the money they need is that there would be no accountability. It is reasonably apparent that governments are not accountable enough for their actions.

i.e. why would they only stop at what they need when they could print 1M and give it to everyone or people who vote for them. And when that 1M is worthless, print another 10M for everyone.

As imperfect as the tax system is there is still a theoretical trace of accountability. Budgets need to be paid through taxes, taxes impact people, people vote for governments, governments create budgets.

I think we need to move towards a system with MORE accountability, less wasteful spending and less deferred debt. Interestingly enough this probably means broadening the tax base, where both rich and poor pay more of the share of total tax. Only then will people have "buy in" to the government and the desire to hold them to account

There was an interesting discussion of this is a book my income tax professor in law school recommended to those who were interesting in the theoretical and philosophical issues of tax systems.

The usual argument against the government printing money is that it causes inflation.

Suppose, for example, you have a $1 000 000 000 000 in circulation. Each dollar is worth 1/1 000 000 000 000 of the value of the total economy.

If the government prints, say, $52 631 578 947 dollars, there is then $1 052 631 578 947 in circulation, each dollar now worth 1/1 052 631 578 947 of the total economy, and the government having 52 631 578 947 of those dollars, giving the government 52 631 578 947/1 052 631 578 947 of the economy, or 5% of economy.

In many ways this is very similar to a 5% flat tax, except there is no need for taxpayers to file returns, no need for complex regulations about what is or is not taxable income, and you can't evade it by keeping your transactions off the record.

From an individual point of view, losing 5% of my purchasing power to inflation isn't really worse than losing 5% of my purchasing power to taxation.

Inflation has another problem, though. As the value of a dollar, as a percent of the total economy, keeps going down, people need more and more of them to get the same things. We'd have to be frequently changing prices, changing pay, and changing everything else that is denoted in dollars.

That was probably a bigger problem in the past, and will be a smaller problem in the future. As more and more transactions go entirely electronic, we could probably internally do everything in some sort of pseudo-dollar that's pegged to a fixed fraction of the total economy or something like that that the electronic systems convert automatically to current dollars on the fly. So you go to the store to buy bread, which the store internally priced using pseudo-dollars, and the electronic price display tag under bread on the shelf converts that 2020 dollars and displays that.

It's freeloading. Their lifestyles are possible because of high paying jobs in cities that invest to create conditions where such jobs can exist at all. (Same for the vaunted high paid remote workers.) They benefit from those investments but do not wish to contribute. This kind of defect cycle eventually leads to killing the goose that's laying the golden eggs.

$ host archive.is

archive.is has address 46.45.185.48

I tried using outline.com, but WSJ isn't supported by them.