"A government big enough to give you everything you want, is big enough to take away everything you have"
Thomas Jefferson

Saturday, May 16, 2009

Going Going - Gone

Hey Tom, how are those Senate Democrats that you so heavily invested in doing now?

No so good, Golisano is fed up with taxation in NYS and this year's budget which brought taxation to a all new high. He is moving his residency to Florida, a move that will save Golisano $13,800 A DAY!

Report From WHEC or LoHud

"Golisano spelled it out. The new state budget would have cost him $5 million this year in income tax alone."

"Golisano blames Governor Paterson and leaders in Albany for passing a budget that raised taxes and increased spending by 9 percent."

Yet, NNY still has state legislators that think this budget was ok!

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey Tom! If that's all it took to get you to leave, I'd have pushed for a tax increase years ago.

Anonymous said...

five million of a billionaires income, seems about right.

Anonymous said...

There is another $5 million the state will b short now. Probably cut some money from the 48th Darrel don't mind.

Anonymous said...

Yes, 10:23, it seems about right. Trouble is, now it's about zero out of a billion. How's that sound to ya?

You guys have got to understand that people with means have options. We can't tax everyone to a rate that makes no sense and expect people to stay here. People tend to avoid taxes, no matter what your VP says. Half of Obama's cabinet are tax evaders.

Anonymous said...

Chase the billionaires out first, then the millionaires, that will leave the rest of us with the 130 billion annual state budget to pay. Raising taxes will just chase working folks out of the state - and next, the country.

Anonymous said...

Can one of you liberals answer a question for me? Why can the Carolina's, Florida, and other states run with no state taxes along with bringing these big bad billionaires in when we already have them and still run deficit budgets? Oh that's right tax more so you can spend more!!!

hermit thrush said...

ncpr's blog touched on this topic back in march. while it's apparently hard to get really good data on the matter, the evidence points to "rich flight" being largely a myth.

Anonymous said...

2:45- ask Pataki- he and his ilk created this mess.....

Anonymous said...

Kermit's right, people aren't really leaving NYS. And if they are, it can't be because of taxes.

My good man, do you come out of the rain? Absolutely incredible.

It's not just NY. Why do you think places like the Cayman Islands has more banks than fish? It's because people and companies go there to avoid taxes. To go someplace, they have to LEAVE someplace.

Never mind, Frog. I'm with you. People can't wait to come to NY to pay our taxes.

Please, someone, drug test this guy.

Anonymous said...

2:45- ask Pataki- he and his ilk created this mess.....

HAHAHAHA No it's Bush's fault haha

Anonymous said...

To Hermit and the other knee-jerk liberals above:

Here's what the Wall Street Journal says about "rich flight" -- real enough, it seems:

"(F)rom 1998 to 2007, more than 1,100 people every day including Sundays and holidays moved from the nine highest income-tax states such as California, New Jersey, New York and Ohio and relocated mostly to the nine tax-haven states with no income tax, including Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire and Texas. We also found that over these same years the no-income tax states created 89% more jobs and had 32% faster personal income growth than their high-tax counterparts."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124260067214828295.html#mod=djemEditorialPage

Now, before you launch into your predicatable rant about "that Murdoch rag," know that the authors used research from one of those big-city think-tanks, like the one that Darrel Aubertine led the fight to fund with your tax dollars through the state budget.

hermit thrush said...

anon 12:04,
thanks for the link. i don't know if you followed up on the link i gave, but here's the key quote from the ny times article linked to on ncpr's blog:

Though tracking the movement of wealthy taxpayers from state to state is difficult, experts on public finance and migration say they have yet to document a substantial “rich drain” in states that have raised income taxes in recent years.

“At the level we’re talking about, there’s no quantitative evidence that it affects the mobility decisions of affluent taxpayers,” said Douglas S. Massey, a demographer at Princeton University and president of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.


that's just diametrically opposed to what moore and laffer write! i don't doubt for a second that some people will flee to avoid higher taxes, but the question is, how many, and what effect do they have on the overall budget? here's what's happened in new jersey, which raised the yearly tax rate on income over $500,000 by 2.6 percentage points in 2006:

But a study by Professor Massey and two colleagues, published in September, estimated that the [2006] tax increase cost New Jersey only 50 to 350 existing “half-millionaire” households — a relatively small number against the total of 44,000 such households in the state.

While those departures cost the state about $38 million a year in revenue, the study estimates, the higher taxes levied on those who stayed have brought in an average of $895 million a year.


who knows, maybe massey's study and the other bits of evidence cited in the times article are flawed, and moore and laffer are right! sadly, i think this is one of those all-too-common he-said-she-said affairs that none of us will really have the expertise (or time!) to get to the bottom of. on the other hand, massey's credentials are extremely strong. and the cold reality is that we're comparing a news article in the times to an opinion piece in the wsj penned by a couple of right-wing ideologues (stephen moore is the former head of the club for growth and arthur laffer is a supply-sider who's credited with the infamous "laffer curve"). of course, none of that proves anything, but it sure leaves me skeptical.

Anonymous said...

I'm with Kermit. People aren't really leaving NY and other high tax states.

Water also flows uphill.


With folks like this, voting, how the hell are we supposed to make any changes here in NY? The answer is, we won't. But he leaves no questions as to how we got into this mess. There's no story the man is unwilling to tell.

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