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New York continuing to lose residents and their incomes to lower-tax states is not a new phenomenon.
We've been writing about population loss and its causes for years now. But what should bring pause to our state's top elected officials is something Wirepoint noted when analyzing the latest population and income loss statistics from the IRS.
"The losses pile up on top of each other, year after year," Wirepoints noted in a report on the newly released IRS data. "And when a state loses income to other states for 21 straight years, the numbers add up."
That's right. Despite being home to the Big Apple and the Wall Street wealth that pays for so much of the state's largess, we have been losing income to other states every year for more than two consecutive decades.
Let that sink in.
One interesting study from December 2021 by Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute analyzed 2021 state migration data from the U.S. found the states gaining population and wealth are largely right-to-work states, have largely Republican leadership at the state level, have low tax burdens, low income taxes, have low electricity costs and lower home prices.
At the same time, studies by Harvard economist Edward Glaeser show many of the country's best cities are led by Democrats in Republican-dominated states. New York Times columnist David Brooks takes that dichotomy as a sign policies favored by both parties are needed for a state to succeed.
"If you look at these success stories, you see they are actually the product of a red-blue mash-up," Brooks said in a Yahoo News article. "Republicans at the state level provide the general business climate, but Democrats at the local level influence the schools, provide many social services and create a civic atmosphere that welcomes diversity and attracts highly educated workers."
There may still be time for New York's Democrats to come to their senses. But one has to wonder, after 21 years of mounting population and income losses, just how much time the state has to reverse course before it finally hits the iceberg that sinks us all.