Mark Hemingway has a fascinating column comparing flourishing Texas to tanking California. Some of the most provocative bits:
Texas is home to 64 Fortune 500 companies -- more than any other state in the union. (California has 51 and New York has 56.) For five years in a row, Texas has topped Chief Executive magazine's poll of the best state to do business.
So why are businesses flocking to Texas and fleeing California? Well, as a recent headline from The Economist put it, in California "They paved paradise and put up the parking taxes."
The decline in tax revenues from households making over $200,000 accounts for 93 percent of California's total decline in tax revenues since 2007
While high-tax states like California are foundering, not-tax states are thriving. From 1997 to 2008, Texas and the other nine states with no personal income tax created 89 percent more jobs and had 32 percent faster personal income growth.
The lessons learned from California's progressive taxation apply to the whole country. A 2008 survey by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development found "taxation is most progressively distributed in the United States" -- even more so than socialist Europe.
Anyone who's ever been to both states knows that California has all of the physical advantages. Indeed, with high tech and entertainment, it has the industrial advantages. To screw that up you really have to try. It's like the Californian corporatists wanted to create an object lesson in the disastrous consequences of left think. Read the whole thing.
Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/2011/02/california-taxes-away-jobs-while-texas-adds-them#ixzz1DTFrqoRT
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