A year ago, Maryland created a higher tax bracket for millionaires intended to help balance the state's finances and make the tax code more progressive. How is it working for them? In the last year the number of Marylanders with more than $1 million in taxable income who filed by the end of April has fallen by 1/3 to about 2,000. Taxes collected from those returns as of last month have declined by roughly $100 million. Increasing taxes on the rich has failed because the rich are mobile and can choose where they live. I am sure the states with lower tax rates, where they moved, appreciate the increased revenue. From glennbeck.com:
VOICE: The Glenn Beck program presents more truth behind America's March to Socialism.
GLENN: You know, there's a lot of things that just don't work. One of them is taxing the rich. What? Taxing the rich, no it doesn't does it work? Really? From the Baltimore Sun, one of Maryland's budget balancing tactics, asking millionaires to pay more money to the state this is from the Baltimore Sun appears to be backfiring. What? A year ago Maryland became one of the first states in the nation to create a higher tax bracket for millionaires intended to help balance the state's finances and make the tax code more progressive. But still quoting from the Sun it is finding that the number of Marylanders with more than $1 million in taxable income who filed by the end of April has fallen by 1/3 to about 2,000. Taxes collected from those returns as of last month have declined by roughly $100 million. Well, you need to tax the people who are left there even more! I can't really? You are saying that millionaires who can generally live wherever they want seem to be for attorneys and accountants and that their clients have moved out of state to avoid the new tax rate. Maryland is such a small state, it's so easy to move a few miles south to Virginia or a few miles north to Pennsylvania. So there are millionaires who are no longer going to be filing in Maryland and their tax returns.
This is the way it should be. The states experiment and then let the populace decide with their feet whether they approve.
ReplyDeleteThe problem arises when the federal government does it. Then there is nowhere to go. Decentralize and put the competition back in governing.