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Comment by CGMthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

So in other words, healthy competition, and may the best man win. Contrary to many comments this is more than political reaction/posturing.

The state of Texas is the world's 8th largest GDP and a diverse one, with no one sector exceeding 9%. Texas is well-positioned relative to NYC for attention around AI, as it is not geographically constrained and has an energy advantage. There is financial credibility built in as 10% of NYSE listings are already HQ'd in Texas. And Texas has a pro-business regulatory environment.

This isn’t a zero-sum game where Texas grows at New York’s expense. The hope is it creates a larger, more dynamic market.

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All true. Texas worker environment is not great though. Folks typically list income tax as an advantage but property and sales taxes more than make up the difference. Also, govt admin is fairly hostile to any infrastructure expansion, preferring to let the local car dealers buy new town charters with no infrastructure.

Environmental regs are not well managed generally.

Anyhow, not the worst state, not the best. Pretty balanced economy, like Ohio, Illinois, California, and Georgia.

> Folks typically list income tax as an advantage but property and sales taxes more than make up the difference.

No, not really. Texas is still below average state taxes and you can see the breakdown of each state here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_income_tax#/media/File:S...

Yep, exactly what I mentioned, more than makes up for it especially once you factor in the higher Case Schiller on recent years causing increases to property taxes since 2022 (date of your image).

> preferring to let the local car dealers buy new town charters with no infrastructure.

I'm curious what this is referring to.

Probably talking about Starbase (elon musk).

Ahh don't know why I missed that one.

Local state legislature has several car dealership owners that also started their own chartered towns. Wasn't thinking about starbase but that qualifies.

Did you have an example you wanted to share?

.. and why it's even a problem.

"Good ole boy network" is real!

Texas wouldn't be texas without it

It could be so much more without it!

Higher property taxes and low income taxes is preferable actually, it keeps the housing market from getting massively distorted.

Ideally you're correct - but it does have the very large side effect of making real estate fraud much more lucrative. This isn't to say that the potential of people breaking a law means we shouldn't have the law at all - but higher property taxes necessitate a much large spend into property value auditors and require a lot more stringency around property improvement permitting to ensure that increases in property value are captured and recorded accurately.

How much fraud we talking? I like to think along Matt Levine's ideas that at least some amount of fraud is acceptable - there will always be some amount of it and under or over-regulation creates a net-negative.

Tough to measure. A couple data points:

-NY state estimate $150–200M per year lost to real estate transfer tax fraud and evasion. On $3B receipts that is 5-6% breakage.

-Harris County (Houston) found $21M in improper homestead exemptions. On ~$7B receipts that is ~0.3% breakage

-Miami-Dade found $35M on $6.5B for improper homestead exemptions, 0.5% breakage

For comparison, IRS net tax gap is about 12%

One would expect transfer tax fraud/evasion to be an order of magnitude different from improper homestead exemptions.

For sure. Probably should be using the total homestead exemption eligibility as the denominator instead of prop tax receipts. Even then transfer tax is a "hill" and the homestead exemption is a "valley." But It's hard enough to estimate any of this data from a keyboard in a few seconds

Except the property taxes aren't based on the actual price paid. The tax assessment and appeal system is more prone to corruption than most states.

You can always move somewhere else. It's a big country with different state laws for every type of preference.

What a strange thing to say - - "sucks to be you if you don't like it, just leave" is not really how I'd expect people to have a conversation around identified policy gaps, especially among people that aren't there.

NYSE Texas didn’t see a huge influx of listings when they moved there and changed their rules. I don’t think “Texas” is particularly interesting to the conversation given the dominant regulatory regime will be federal and the trading will happen in NJ but I could be wrong.

There are lots of stock exchanges, which have started for lots of reasons but there isn’t really much of an industry desire to be out of nyse/nasdaq for vanilla listings. If there was it would have already happened.

Seems like a publicity stunt to siphon some regnms traffic and maybe some etf listings to me, but no big drama if not.

>This isn’t a zero-sum game where Texas grows at New York’s expense.

Not at all.

New York is standing to gain quite a bit.

>TXSE was backed by wealth management giant BlackRock and market maker Citadel Securities, among other firms.

>The Texas company said in June 2024 that it raised a total of $120 million from more than two dozen investors.

Ever heard of "The Texas Company" from 100 years ago when they first discovered huge gushing oil wells in Beaumont? Popularly known as Texaco, it was of course, a New York company.

Go back before 1837 and Houston itself was unpopulated ranchland while San Antonio and El Paso were well-established western towns.

Until New York investors bought the ranch and built the planned industrial community we know today.

As someone who's considered taking my company public (not a tech company) it's nice to see easier listing requirements on this exchange than the big ones.

The most insightful part of your comment was that you needed a throwaway account to preserve your HN social credit score to take a completely moderate and constructive position.

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