Most Texans pay more in taxes than Californians, data suggests
expressnews.com
expressnews.com
This is pretty misleading. The report in question doesn't say whether Texans or California's actually pay more per capita - it's entirely as a percentage of the total state tax collected. https://itep.org/whopays/ (EDIT: This isn't correct, it's as percentage of income by average income in state, but the brackets are different per state).
So it's because they are missing an income tax. But if someone hit you with a 50% income tax next year, you wouldn't consider your tax bill lower just because your share become proportionally smaller.
With that in mind, per capita tax in California is ~$6800 and in Texas it's $4400.
FWIW, I've never actually heard anyone complain about state taxes in California or consider moving because of them. The exodus to Texas has less to do with taxes and much more to do with general cost of living, which is still largely a function of state government.
The graph shows what percentage of their income people pay towards state and local taxes.
The lowest bracket in the ITEP data for California tops out at $23k, but it's only ~$20k for Texas. Meanwhile, the middle bracket in California tops out at $62k, while Texas it's only $58k. So again, the sales tax could be the exact same in both states, but it would show up as larger percentage of budget because people in Texas are poorer on average.
https://www.fastcompany.com/27309/whos-writing-book-web-busi...
>You moved from New York to Seattle to start this business. Why?
>It sounds counterintuitive, but physical location is very important for the success of a virtual business. We could have started Amazon.com anywhere. We chose Seattle because it met a rigorous set of criteria. It had to be a place with lots of technical talent. It had to be near a place with large numbers of books. It had to be a nice place to live — great people won’t work in places they don’t want to live. Finally, it had to be in a small state. In the mail-order business, you have to charge sales tax to customers who live in any state where you have a business presence. It made no sense for us to be in California or New York.
Pretty genius to recognize the pricing advantage from people evading sales and use tax in the cutthroat retail business which was unable to be exploited as easily before the internet.
Because you don't know where to look, or what you're seeing.
Source: am tax lawyer. In California. Have seen and helped individuals with hundreds of millions in annual income escape to other places.
I've never understood the level of greed required to be that rich and be so worried about paying your taxes.
Comparing per capita taxes tells you more about per capita income rather than relative taxation rates.
The whole point is that the average texan pays a higher percentage of their income in state taxes than the average californian and Texas taxes are more regressive.
The numbers show that a poor person in Texas pays more than a poor person in California with the same income. The average income of the bottom 20% is 13,000 and they pay an average of 13% in total taxes for an average tax burden of 1690. The average income of the bottom 20% in California is 14,300 and they pay an average of 10.5% in total taxes for an averagr tax burden of 1501.5
Thus the bottom 20% in Texas not only make less money but then also have to pay more total taxes than their higher income counterpart in California.
For poor people Texas is a higher tax state than California.
Allow me to be the first - with both a philosophical and a practical critique.
First, philosophical: The highest marginal tax rate in California is 13.3% which, combined with the maximum marginal federal rate of 37%, crosses an anchor point, or threshold, that I mentally hold of greater than half.
You see, I consider tax rates to be largely arbitrary - I cannot affix any particular value judgement on, say, 18% vs 22% vs 27% tax rates. They seem equally reasonable, on principle ... they seem arbitrary to me ...
... until they are greater than half.[1] This is my personal feeling.
Second, a practical critique: I have no problem with high tax rates - provided I get high value for my taxpayer dollar. If the trains all run on time and the power is on and everything looks like Zurich (the Canton) then please, do indeed, subject me to high tax rates. Conversely, if things look like California circa 2022 I'd be reasonable content with (some lower, obviously arbitrary) tax rate.
As it stands, we get the worst of both worlds: relatively high (globally!) tax rates, no trains at all (never mind being on time) and spotty electricity ... among other things.
[1] Cue the misunderstood, misinterpreted retelling of sky-high marginal tax rates from the end of world war 2. These were war profiteering policies and had nothing to do with policies of progressive taxation as we think of them. It is incorrect, for instance, to compare the 95% excess profits tax of 1943 with tax rates in our modern era: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_profits_tax
> The model holds that if municipalities offered varying baskets of goods (government services) at a variety of prices (tax rates), that people with different personal valuations of these services and prices would move from one local community to another which maximizes their personal utility.
My only quip is that the marginal rate doesn't apply on every single dollar, so while it's true that after a certain dollar threshold, every incremental dollar is taxed at greater than half, your net effective rate remains well below half, for whatever that's worth.
Howdy! Nice you meet you!
Yes, there were other factors (like general cost of living, the more interesting weather, and me liking guns and not liking California's policies regarding them), but the reduction in income taxes was indeed a motivator for me hopping the California/Nevada border.
My guess is that you're not spending time with the right Californians. It was a very common complaint. My best friend in high school also moved to a lower tax state.
Edit: The report does not include tolls, but I would incorporate tolls into taxes also, especially for lower income groups. One can easily spend $1k to $2k per year in tolls in the Northeast, and I know Texas is quite heavily tolled in some areas as well.
Edit 2: The ITEP report also does not incorporate the effects of property tax laws in CA which give people who purchased land earlier and their descendants a much lower property tax liability (proportionally) than people who purchase land later.
They are very wrong about property taxes, which calls their entire analysis into question. Renters aren't the ones paying property tax, especially for expensive areas like SF. The savings property taxes from prop 13 absolutely does not get passed to the renters. If anything, it does the opposite because it disincentivises home sales.
So we can divide the rental market into high-tax and low-tax properties. The landlords of high-tax properties must incorporate the tax into the rent. Meanwhile, the landlords of low-tax properties can set their rents just as high, since they compete in the same market, and pocket the tax difference.
In contrast, a flat property tax reduction would increase the profit margins of all landlords equally, and any one of them could start undercutting the others and be undercut in return, which over time in an efficient market will tend to lower prices back to a similar margin before the tax reduction.
http://gameofrent.com/content/can-lvt-be-passed-on-to-tenant...
Similarly, how is a corporate profit tax less regressive than a sales tax? Won't the price be passed on to consumers all the same?
So in Northern California, if you cross the Bay Bridge or the Golden Gate Bridge as part of your daily commute—assuming a 5 day/week workweek in the office for historical purposes but as a caveat, this may be inaccurate in the present—you can easily spend between $1500 and $2K/year in bridge tolls.
BART is also an option, but is in the same ballpark at about $1500-1700 depending on how many days of the year you work and that’s assuming a West Oakland to Embarcadero commute so it only goes up from there if you live and work further from those stations. Maybe you end up not having to pay for parking on the other side though if you live near the station, although some people end up having to pay for parking at a BART garage.
Transportation is expensive.
> Transportation is expensive.
now if I were to start a business on the other hand, then things would be different.
That says it all, doesn't it!
Drive out the businesses, and the tax revenue will dry up.
As for the power grid, California has massive problems with it. Washington State is suing to block a natural gas pipeline to California, so California will burn filthy coal instead.
There's a current bill working through the CA legislature that will shut down small time fast food franchises.
Maybe whatever laws in the past year dethroned California, but I am not willing to bet on it.
CA will always have an advantage due to its climate and ports. But other countries have still managed to squander such advantages.
California's electric grid has problems, but burning coal isn't one of them. Coal represents 0.15% of electricity generation in the state and 3% of overall power consumption when accounting for power imports.
Also, coal isn't used for peaker plants, which is what California uses a lot of natural gas for. That service will be replaced by dispatchable storage and loads.
Coal.
The state isn't building new coal capacity at all. It's cheaper by nearly every metric to build renewables and storage than build new coal capacity, or just import natural gas from another source.
No, it says the comparison is a lot more nuanced than some would like to believe.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/big-labor-eats-small-business-i...
It's about the FAST Recovery Act. You can google it and see for yourself.
yes for Texas.
California is doing fine too cause different businesses want to be here for other reason and pay the tax for it and they are fine. I was not implying one is better than the other I was stating what was best for my situation and was glad I moved away from Texas.
The only reason this is an issue for people is because of property tax in high real estate cost locales (Austin) compared to California that has wonky property taxes due to Prop 13.
Is it?
My understanding is that they calculate the absolute value and then reverse it back into a % of their income (also known as effective tax rate, but in this case your effective tax rate for ALL taxes, not just income tax). The way I understand the data is along the following simplified example:
A person who makes $100k in CA with a 10% income tax, and a $1M valued home @ 1% tax, pays $20k in taxes each year, which is 20% of their income.
A person who makes $100k in TX with a 0% income tax, and a $1M valued home @ 2.2% tax, pays $22k in taxes each year, which is 22% of their income.
Texas is a regressive system because it taxes an individuals total take-home income harder even, and especially, when their wealth (most people's wealth is tied to home value) goes up. The whole state of Texas, even outside of cities, is seeing property values go up.
EDIT: Fixed my math. Posted that way too quick.
EDIT2: While my example illustrates the danger in property values outpacing wages, the crux of the current issue is largely due to excise taxes:
https://itep.org/whopays/texas/
Basically you pay an extra 6% "on all retail sales, leases and rentals of most goods, as well as taxable services" in the state of Texas: https://comptroller.texas.gov/taxes/sales//#:~:text=Texas%20....
A person in CA a 50k income will not pay a 10% income tax OR usually own a $1M valued home.
(Trying to make $20k 20% of $50k and failing)
Methinks you may have picked these numbers to tilt things in favor of CA. If the income were _slightly_ more in line with what might be considered “reasonable” for a $1M house, like say $250K, suddenly the math makes much more sense in Texas.
And this doesn’t even get into the whole “house that costs $1M in CA wouldn’t cost $1M in Texas” thing...
With more and more people moving to Texas, it's not unrealistic to see more $1M homes.
People tend to buy the most house they can afford, not just the most house they need. If you have 1M for a house, you buy a 1M house in Cali or TX. Most wouldn’t move to TX and buy something cheaper, but instead something bigger.
In regressive tax states, tax revenue "per capita" may be lower (because you're leaving a lot of money on the table - you're letting the rich take home more) and you've de-facto shifted the tax burden to people who have less money to begin with. So a large percentage of the population ends up paying more in taxes - the people who make less and use most of their income for purchases - while the high income earners pay less. You simultaneously reduce the money available for government programs while penalizing the people who need those programs more.
Note: people on HN are likely to be the "high income" earners who benefit from such a tax regime. If you're looking to work remotely and are optimizing to this level - i.e., you are seeking out regressive tax regions so you can pocket more money - you might want to consider whether this is a moral choice you actually feel comfortable with.
Also, you are making a bunch of conclusions not in evidence. The evidence, at least for Texas, shows that the majority of tax revenue comes from high income earners, primarily because they're land owners who buy more expensive/larger properties and because they make larger purchases. The state gets its income from property tax and sales tax primarily, both of which are considered "regressive taxes". While you're correct that these taxes account for a larger percentage of income for someone with lower income, the net effect is that the majority of the tax burden is being paid by more wealthy residents. Generally the right thing to do for people in lower income brackets in states without income tax is to increase their income, since they aren't penalized for it. In other states, you get penalized for increasing income, and in many cases are completely out of reach of ever having property ownership. Average people own homes in Texas, average people in California rent forever.
Ultimately, I suppose it's a good thing for these sorts of analysis to occur because it's more information to consider, but I do think there's some insidiousness to the way this is framed both in the article and in many of the comments. I don't even live in Texas anymore, but I definitely don't want to see it Californiated. If you want to live in California and think it's a better deal, go live in California, don't demand that Texas matches the same tax regime.
Which is?
If you bought a 200K Pulte box home, you'll be WAY better off.
If you bought a 1MM Toll Brothers new build, yeah, you gonna get killed in taxes in Texas
There are a handful of listings in the ~$300k range, where the property tax will run around $800/mo.
In any case, the lower tax rate in CA gets baked into the property value (hence the sky-high valuations) so you're paying for it either way. Comparing equivalent homes in NYC/Jersey City or Boston to those in Silicon Valley or LA makes it easy to see the effect property taxes have on valuations.
[1] https://www.redfin.com/TX/Austin/2015-Ploverville-Ln-78728/h...
The tax estimate is based on an assessment based on a sale that happened 6 years ago, which ends up valuing the house at $100k (roughly 25%) less. :-) A new buyer would have a hard time paying the same tax because this would involve successfully arguing that the property is worth $100k less than what they just paid for it. $800/mo is likely in the ballpark of what the new owner would be looking at.
EDIT: Since millage rates are public, we don't have to guess. The topline Austin (Travis County) millage rage is 2.1767, so if that property were in the city of Austin its taxes on a $385k assessed value would be 8,380.29, or $698/mo. It may actually be in Pflugerville (hard to tell at a glance) where the taxes are lower due to letting Austin taxpayers pay for the big shared muni services.
The other effects are interesting, but my experience living in TX is it is definitely not a low-tax state.
> but my experience living in TX is it is definitely not a low-tax state
Dunno, I'd take property taxes (i.e. taxes on consumption of real estate) over income taxes. Particularly since income taxes are progressive whereas property taxes are a flat percentage. Even if I paid $2k/month in additional property taxes, the difference in income taxes would still make TX cheaper.
The killer with high property taxes is that you have to keep earning more as your property increases in value, or there is a real risk of you falling behind. Similarly if you are ever unemployed you might prefer a tax proportional to your income. Obviously this also makes retiring early even more difficult. But there’s a system to suit every need, I guess.
That's a feature, not a bug. The entire reason California's real estate market is so dysfunctional is that people are disincentivized from selling due to Prop 13, so you have people living in oversized houses paying a tiny fraction of the property tax their neighbors are.
You "falling behind" means someone else gets a fair shot at living in the area without being disadvantaged by a 10x higher property tax.
Ideally the property would never increase in value in the first place, because we'd build enough housing to prevent that.
This is the key takeaway from all of my experiences reading about and owning property. We'd all be much better off if we built a ton more housing, but that doesn't fall within the Overton window and so likely will not happen.
Not if the municipality has a fixed budget and all property values are rising in the municipality. The mill-rate changes so that you only pay more taxes if your property has gone up relatively more than other properties in your municipality. See thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32528916
Also if your property value has gone up, you have gained equity, so that may offset increased taxes (depending on divers factors).
In an area where property values are rising, other costs typically increase as well. Municipalities can't often provide the same services on a fixed budget any more than businesses can do so.
> Also if your property value has gone up, you have gained equity, so that may offset increased taxes (depending on divers factors).
This doesn't help unless you borrow against the increase in equity. Otherwise it just means less money in your pocket monthly.
Then if you followed the info to the actual study you found that the most frequent destination for the folks moving out of Minnesota was ... California.
The point being I'm not sure how many people really move for just "taxes" and a lot more plays into it, and taxes are too complex to say "this state or that state" as it really depends on who you are and your situation(s).
Washington did pass a law to impose a 7% long-term capital gains tax on earnings >250k, but it was struck down in a lawsuit and is now being appealed to the state supreme court: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/washingto...
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/douglas-c...
> The plaintiffs — which include owners of farmland and the Washington Farm Bureau — argued that the new law imposes among other things a tax on income.
> the Opportunity for All Coalition, which has advocated against the capital gains tax, applauded the ruling
You can find them in the bluest of places:
https://ballotpedia.org/San_Francisco,_California,_Propositi...
> The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association filed a lawsuit against the city and county in August 2018 stating that the commercial rent tax for childcare initiative did not receive sufficient votes.
> Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association President Jonathan Coupal said the group was prepared to sponsor an initiative to require a two-thirds supermajority vote of the people for local tax increases for specific purposes.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Oakland-sued-for...
> A group of property owners has sued Oakland over the City Council’s certification of a tax measure that failed to reach a standard two-thirds threshold at the polls in November
> The lawsuit was filed Friday in Alameda County Superior Court by half a dozen homeowners and landlords as well as the Jobs and Housing Coalition, a group that lobbies City Hall on behalf of businesses and developers.
FWIW: back when Planet Money tried to find some sort of political consensus among economists, lack of an income tax was actually one of the proposals: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/499490275
(In terms of tax policy. Lots of other areas leave much to be desired)
>This study provides important context for those interested in state and local tax policies... It finds that nearly every state fails the basic test of tax fairness
If everyone fails the test, perhaps it's not that the test takers are in the wrong, but maybe the test isn't administrated properly.
tl;dr: Top 20% pays less in taxes in TX than CA.
(This ignores the effect of new development, the revenue from which isn’t counted towards the 8% cap.)
In other words, if your home value change is the same as average home value change, your taxes will go up 8% if the taxing entity elects the full 8% increase.
This is not to deny that we pay taxes in indirect ways. For example, property tax can be higher in Texas than in California, especially for older properties; and anyone who pays rent is going to pay some surplus in order to cover property tax. Say that a person rents a studio in a major Texas city for 1500 USD a month. With a Gross Rent Multiplier of 10 (probably high for Texas; low for California), that is about 180000 USD of property and it will be taxed at around 1%, or 1800 USD, per year. This suggests that about 150 USD/month of that person's rent in Texas is to cover taxes -- that's considerable!
In California, a room in a house in a major city might cost 2000 USD a month; a studio might cost 3000 USD a month or more. Even if the nominal tax rate in California is the same as in Texas, for much of California's housing stock, the tax rate is based not on the current valuation but a valuation from the time of sale -- which can be many decades ago. Instead of paying 10% of their rent to cover taxes, a person in California might be paying much, much less -- 5% or even 1%. Even when they're paying 3000 USD for a studio, then, they might be paying much less property tax.
However, a person in California paying 3000 USD for a studio is not better off than someone paying 1500 USD for a studio in Texas, simply because they are paying less tax. They do not have more space, more bathrooms, &c -- they are paying more for the same thing. The focus on tax policy ignores many other policy factors that overall contribute to a more manageable cost of living.
Here is a web site you can use to look up Gross Rent Multipliers: https://apartmentpropertyvaluation.com/gross-rent-multiplier...
Here are the analyses that the Reddit post that the article referenced are based on:
i use badwolf[0] for quick paywalled articles.
In the absence of income tax, taxes come from sources like consumption (e.g. sales taxes) and other things like property taxes. Lower income people save less money; they spend more of their income and so will pay more of their income in consumption taxes.
Even if my income is 10x that of the “lower income” class of people, and I pay more absolute taxes, its less burdensome to me to do that, because I presumably have already secured housing, and basic food, and basic transit, and that tax money I spent is of lesser marginal value.
50% goes towards primary school + 30% goes to my local city but the money doesn’t seem to impact education outcomes or general quality of life near me.
I don’t mind the distribution but it stings when local government seems to be plagued by chronic mismanagement.
https://old.reddit.com/r/economy/comments/wjkqdx/low_taxes_f...
That is, many formerly $7.25/hr rate entry level jobs in Texas are now paying closer to $15/hr. Because once a few companies adopt it, others have to compete. Also, some areas have their own minimum. Austin has had a $15/hr minimum for several years, recently raised to $22.
https://www.maine.gov/revenue/sites/maine.gov.revenue/files/...
http://www.maine.gov/revenue/faq/sales-use-service-provider-...
https://www.thecentersquare.com/california/california-reside...
I worry that the ITEP study (https://itep.org/whopays/) is basically misleading because (a) it tries to present the welfare of people as depending on taxation rather than the overall cost of living and (b) it uses percentage of income rather than the absolute amount of taxation to effectively argue that people who pay more taxes -- while not necessarily receiving more from the state -- are somehow paying less.
I would argue that since this is completely caused by State and Local governments, you can argue this is a tax levied by the state and distributed to property owners.
Prop 13 leads to perverse incentives where homeowners are disincentivized to allow developments in their area, so that they can "Preserve the Character of the Neighborhood". (Otherwise, they may want to allow development, to reduce demand and thus their property tax load)
This also leads to underfunded local services, like education, which is mostly funded by local property taxes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13
Education is underfunded, and in California local property taxes aren't contributing much.
> This also leads to underfunded local services, like education, which is mostly funded by local property taxes.
Progressive taxes can still be achieved, through property taxes, sales taxes on luxury goods, and taxes on excessive usage of public goods.
There should be that tax because bigger and more luxurious properties usually cut down more trees to clear space, and usually use building materials that are pollutive/environmentally destructive than commonplace materials.
But in reality, income taxes mostly contribute shifting income to non income benefits for employees.
https://floridarevenue.com/taxes/taxesfees/pages/sales_tax.a...
Florida used to allow online businesses not based in florida to forego collecting sales tax when shipping to florida (but it was always owed as use tax by the Florida resident recipient), but starting last year, businesses with more than $100k of online sales had to start collecting and remitting sales taxes also.
Car registration is dirt cheap (<$100/year), housing is dirt cheap (200k get you a house with a swimming pool), electricity is super cheap (when it is not snowing) and gasoline is almost half price compared to California.
So what’s the angle here? Things that make you go hmmm…
So they raise your valuation 20% a year (if you're in an avg market). For the last 10 years. And then the rate goes from 1.2% to 1.9% over the same time. And that doesn't even cover highway use, as they've all got tolls now.
With no Prop 13, anyone who picked the right hood as poor or middle class can no longer afford to stay.
Looks like most of it comes from sales and excise taxes.
Let's say you bought a house for $100k 10 years in a small town in Texas. People start moving in, but you still only make $50k/year. Now your house is worth $500k. That 1-3% property tax still hits your income.
Further, the big problem here is ridiculous growth in property prices. While obviously some areas do occasionally experience a few years of exceptional growth, it would be dumb to assume that any given area is going to 5x in property value in 10 years. Even if it did in the past, such growth should not be expected to continue in perpetuity. Over the long term, property appreciation rates average around 4% annually, over 10 years you ought to expect a 100k house to go up in value to 148k. By comparison, assuming a 3% raise every year on average and no job changes, someone starting at 50k/yr should be making 67k/yr after a decade. Under such normal circumstances, a 2% property tax with no income tax would have a tax to income ratio of 4% versus 12% for a 10% income tax and 1% property tax. The rate of change in tax to income ratio is better with the income tax, a 2% increase in 10 years versus a 10% increase, but still it takes 166 years for for the high property tax option to overtake the income tax option. While some people may get unlucky (if you can call your net worth skyrocketing unlucky), going with the high property tax option is objectively the better strategy.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/10/home-prices-are-now-rising-m...
Wages for equivalent jobs have been pretty stagnant for the past 50 years, but people personally tend to make more money year over year as they gain experience. Or in otherwords, a 25 year old right now is not much better off than a 25 year old 20 years ago, but a 45 year old right now is likely much better off than a 25 year old 20 years ago.
And that's just a random suburb nobody outside of TX has ever heard of.
Quality journalism right here.
Also, OP isn't actually saying the information is wrong because its reddit, rather he's saying it's lazy journalism - which it is.
Right - because reddit is not inherently trustworthy (even though there are subject-matter experts that post there)
> when really it's just one degree removed.
Hence, 'lazy journalism' (or the sarcastic 'quality journalism') moniker. They were just one degree removed from an authoritative source, and they didn't bother linking to either the reddit post, or the authoritative source (though hard to tell because of paywall)
All the Reddit post is there for is the handy graph it has that puts Texas and California side-by-side. In the source there are separate pages for each state so if you want a side-by-side comparison of Texas and California you have to make your own graph, or find someone who already did so and use theirs. I don't see anything wrong with doing the latter.
From another comment I gather there is a paywall that is stopping some people from seeing the full article. I wonder if that is cutting off the article right below the graph, so some people are not realizing that the article isn't based on the graph from Reddit?
They could be real, or credible, but even if they are, if I see journalists directly cite Reddit/Twitter, I can't help but think the exact same thought: "Quality journalism right here."
“ Texans in the bottom 20 percent of income earners — those earning less than $20,900 — pay 13 percent of their income in state and local taxes, while those in the top 1 percent of income earners — those earning $617,900 or more — pay only 3.1 percent.
In California, the bottom 20 percent of income earners — those earning less than $23,200 — pay 10.5 percent in state and local taxes, while the top 1 percent — those earning $714,400 or more — pay 12.4 percent.”
There are many things that cause housing in California to be expensive (proposition 13, rent control, the excessively bureaucratic processes for building additional housing, single use zoning, etc.), and all of them need to be addressed.
What's the rate you'll get from PG&E again?
Gas is ~$3.45/gal around me. Looks like gas around LA is ~$4.79/gal. $1.34/gal difference at the moment. A 25mpg car going an average 13,500 miles in a year, that's $723 more expensive in CA than TX right now. According to their data, the difference tax rate between the two is like 2.5% for the lowest group. 2.5% of $20,900 is $522.50. So congrats, you paid less in taxes but ended up paying $200 more in the end just factoring in fuel cost differences.
I wonder what the point of piece like this is for. To dissuade people from migrating to Texas?