In announcing the proposed tax hike, the Harris-Walz campaign said it was part of its plan to make sure corporations and billionaires “pay their fair share.” That’s a well-worn weasel term politicians use that is arbitrary, subjective and typically defined by ideological leanings.
The shift in the past years has not been insignificant. New York, for example, has lost nearly 160 companies in the past five years because of choking regulations and state corporate tax rates of up to 7.25 per cent on top of the federal levy. The cost of doing business in the state, including attracting and retaining talent, has fuelled the exodus, mainly to Florida and Tennessee.
Florida and Texas, which are the fast-growing states in the union, would clearly welcome anything that would trigger more migration from north to south or west to east and stoke their already white-hot economic furnaces. The success of these programs has been both a brain-drain and a tax revenue drain for California to the point where its governor, Gavin Newsom, has been considering imposing what amounts to an exit tax on those who leave the state.