Sure, I'm biased because I moved here from NYC, but also check out Nashville. You can live like a Columbian drug lord on NYC (or California) freelance rates.
I was kind of turned-off of TN due to Memphis, but maybe Nashville is enough better to be worth considering.
I know a lot of Memphis residents who have relocated to Nashville. One guy described it as "life-changing." The cities are completely different. The problem with Nashville is the same as the problem with Austin - it's surrounded by rural hicks. On the other hand, I moved here because housing is cheap and it allows me to do the things I want to do (like travel) while keeping my overhead low.
At the high end of moving out (rich people), California is unappealing because it's budgetfucked. Education, transportation, public services, and everything else will suffer for a long time. This leads to their crazy high state income tax and crazy high sales taxes and municipalities doing insane additional taxes for businesses on top of everything else. The Bay Area may be the best place to create Show Me Your Food…
"In other words, the highest-income Californians were less likely to leave the state after the millionaire tax was passed." http://www.stanford.edu/group/scspi/_media/working_papers/Va... By the way, the reason the state is "budgetfucked" as you eloquently put it is because of low taxes, not high taxes. You may be interested in reading about Proposition 13, a scheme under which people who are sitting on massively val…
Quite true. Prop 13 is an abomination. Instead of only homeowners paying reasonable real estate tax, they've essentially made everybody in california subsidize low-tax-locked real estate owners. Now you get to have the fun of paying virtual real estate tax without owning property.
It turns out, we have the ability to not live there!
It's not quite sane to take a multimillion dollar exit in California when Seattle has zero additional overhead. Though, it is an absolute dickhead move to build your company in California then "establish residency" in a zero-income/capital gains tax state solely to avoid California tax harassment.
The Manhattan Institute is an explicitly conservative political organisation. That doesn't inherently invalidate any of the conclusions they draw, but readers should be aware that they have been made with a pro-free market, anti-big government mindset. Others may draw quite different conclusions from the same facts.
I don't think this is relevant. The reason that people for the most are leaving is not politics or taxes, but high cost of living. The biggest expense for most people is housing. From 1930-2000, almost everyone who moved to CA made money on exploding real-estate values, eithe directy or indirectly. This extended massively peoples wealth, so they lived in houses and with a lifestyle they could never afford based on th…
Well, I would think some people roll in taxes as part of cost of living. Especially with California with its taxes disguised as "fees". But cost of housing is a huge factor as you say.
After just roughly scanning the graphs I'd speculate that the ageing society plays a role. Which could explain why less liberal states are experiencing a rise of population, while the more liberal states are experiencing a decline. Which is just my hunch (without any source or proof) that people get more conservative with age. And another one, that they prefer to live in places with like-minded folks. Just wild guess…
There are also numbers that suggest the more conservative states, such as Texas, are becoming more liberal over time. I would almost wager that Texas, at it's current growth rate, could be a swing state by the 2020 Presidential Election.
What do you mean by becoming more liberal? If anything the white population of texas has become more conservative and solidly republican over time. Until the hispanic population reaches a tipping point texas will be as conservative as any deep southern state. Just based on population data that really won't happen until 2028 at the earliest.
It seems like there are several additional ways one could spin the data in this report. From a selfish standpoint, should I, as a Californian in a booming industry that looks like it will remain a central part of the economy for the forseeable future, be too broken up about a lot of people moving elsewhere for jobs? Should I want the metro area I live in to be seeing double-digit-percentages population growth over de…
There's lots of ways this data could be interpreted. If you look at the data by national origin, a contributor to the outflow of "domestic migration" is first-generation children of foreign immigrants to California. This net flow is a just a fact of life for any state that receives large influx of foreign immigration. The immigrants move here and their children, having no particular long-standing roots in the state, move around.
California has more than twice as many foreign-born residents as any other state, and more than three times as many as Texas. These foreign-born women in turn have more children than natural citizens of the state (about 90 per 1000 women per year).
Seriously considering Seattle or Las Vegas, or farther afield, Hawaii or New Zealand, in 2013+.
The problem with the great California Exodus is the people leaving CA end up trying to re-create CA wherever they move. Just look at the Californication of Seattle, Hawaii and Denver.
Anecdote: Walking around Seattle, I stumbled into an olive oil/butter shop (think: wine shop, but not). In this shop was an 8 year old girl. She, in the shop without a parent or guardian, asked the attendant, "Which one of these is the organic butter? I only eat organic."
Of course, you have to take the jobless rate with a grain of salt as it does not take into to account people who have just given up looking all together. I still wonder if population decline in California could contribute to lower unemployment (more jobs open for the people that stay in the state).
So that's why my rent here in the SF Bay Area is decreasing! (Not).
I admit it was kind of nice after the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989 and the dot-com bust in 2001 to have some breathing room. Alarms about hordes leaving California have the opposite effect on me, as I look forward to uncrowded hiking trails and affordable real estate.
"In other words, the highest-income Californians were less likely to leave the state after the millionaire tax was passed." http://www.stanford.edu/group/scspi/_media/working_papers/Va... By the way, the reason the state is "budgetfucked" as you eloquently put it is because of low taxes, not high taxes. You may be interested in reading about Proposition 13, a scheme under which people who are sitting on massively val…
Quite true. Prop 13 is an abomination. Instead of only homeowners paying reasonable real estate tax, they've essentially made everybody in california subsidize low-tax-locked real estate owners. Now you get to have the fun of paying virtual real estate tax without owning property. It turns out, we have the ability to not live there! It's not quite sane to take a multimillion dollar exit in California when Seattle has…
It's California's stupid fault for picking that tax system. It's not like residence-based income taxes were decreed by God as the only way to fund a government.
I don't think this is relevant. The reason that people for the most are leaving is not politics or taxes, but high cost of living. The biggest expense for most people is housing. From 1930-2000, almost everyone who moved to CA made money on exploding real-estate values, eithe directy or indirectly. This extended massively peoples wealth, so they lived in houses and with a lifestyle they could never afford based on th…
I think it obviously does matter. The conclusion of the paper was clearly written before the rest of it. Gems totally unsupported by the preceding evidence include "California has cut taxes in the past, most dramatically with 1978’s Proposition 13, and when it has done so, prosperity has followed. Ballot propositions this November aim to do the reverse, raising taxes on business owners while the state is still strugg…
The point is taxes are second order. Locally (st.city) are based on either property values and incomes. (1) if incomes cannot support paying the housing costs, they cannot support higher taxes, because there is no excess earning power; (2) if people cant pay the rent, then they are likely to move away to "somewhere more affordable". Most people spend ~30 pc of their income on tax and another ~30pc income on housing. So those are material numbers. When housing was going up=up=up, the mismatch of income to consumption was masked. Lower income supported higher living b/c the real-estate capital gains was not taxed and the grand-fathered real-estate became a lower % of income as salaries rose proportionate to real estate. So, if you had a 10 year house, you had $500K appreciation in the bank (no tax) and maybe a morgage taking only 15% of income b./cause it was bought cheap. this leaves a lot to pay taxes no problem. But same people cannot make math work if they need 30 pc after tax to pay rent, and 30 pc to pay tazes. 40%r residual for save/consume vs 55% is almost 1/3 drop, and a big difference. If gov;t ups taxes anothe 5%, then 55 to 35 is even bigger hit. But without the 500k in appreciation per decae accruing to savings, the 35% needs even more to be allocated to savings. So spendin cash mabed is only 20-25% from 55% in this example. In other words, that is a huge pay cut doing same work, etc. And that knind of pay-cut (1/2 order of magnitude) will cause people to look for new places to live. The taxes issue is more a problem for businesses (who are next in line after consumers to get taxed), but it is the residential people moving out that is the focus of the discussion for the most part here.