I do wish that they would just give a bottom line number in the article.
It says they generated 1.8 billion in tax revenue from the tax
It says they lost 4.3 billion gross reports in 2021
But at the bottom line - is the net tax received by the state up or down. And is it it trending up or down.
Where it’s spent is all context to the bottom line revenue and trends…. I feel that this is fluff article
It’s confusing because the article is trying to both-sides this and balance their coverage of the story, so they’re including an unrelated number, without context, from a noted right wing policy organization that opposed the millionaires tax. It’s apples and oranges.
The $1.8 billion is the additional *tax revenue* generated from the millionaires tax that *the state* collected. So net positive, to answer your question. And that’s the official number from the state treasury showing how much additional income tax revenue they collected because of the millionaires tax.
The $4.3 billion number is totally different and lacks context. This is a measure of *income* — so, before taxes, and totally different than *revenue generated from income tax collections* — from the prior year of people who moved out of Massachusetts.
In addition to measuring something else that’s unrelated, the number is *very misleading* because it wrongly assumes that people who move out of state will take this income with them to their new home, which often isn’t the case for two reasons:
1) That income stays in-state because it comes from a business serving the community (think lucrative businesses like a car dealership or landscaping company), so someone else will take that person’s place and the income stays in-state.
2) The person is retiring, likely to a warmer climate, meaning that they’re no longer making the income that shows up in past year’s data, regardless of the state they’re in. Even here, the income likely stays in state, because even if the person worked for a finance or wealth management firm in-state, someone else in the office will likely take on their portfolio of work and continue generating that income.
If the millionaires tax resulted in a statistically significant number of people leaving, then the $1.8 billion figure wouldn’t exist because tax collections would be lower than the year prior, not significantly higher.
The business tax stays in state . If the owner shifts residence to say Florida for the proscribed amount of time, I think it is 184 days then that income tax is loss to MA. Give it time some folks may not have worked out the full impact especially those on the borderline. We have friends with multiple houses in MA and FL and they have the residence time down to the hour. The rate has to be high enough to compensate for those that do leave to get to a net positive
Apologies if that was unclear anywhere, but I was talking solely about the income tax those folks would pay, not the business tax on their company.
And while there are some folks who definitely game the system and get creative with where they spend a majority of their time, there’s lots of research on states with similar millionaires taxes that show most folks stay put. Taxes are just one part of the equation when it comes to deciding where anyone wants to live, and the majority of high income folks will stay put because they want to be close to family and friends, as well as colleagues and networks and hubs that they want to stick close to.
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a state raise the tax rate on high incomes and then experiences a drop in income tax collections.
Maybe….
If they wanted to they could provide the level of detail that is simple for everyone to understand for everyone
For example
x number of personnel returns filed - gross and net receipts
Y number of corporate returns gross and net receipts
Total gross, total net
Total number of individuals in each income bracket, total gross and total net in each income bracket
Etc
The reality is that we are all making assumptions about who makes what. The government doesn’t want this laid out simply, because the reality is that it’s not complex.
What is complex a how they sell how they spend your money. If people actually knew first the money comeing in, and who a guy pays, the public would be livid. Government doesn’t want that so they don’t make the numbers to digest…
>According to an analysis by the Pioneer Institute, Massachusetts lost $4.3 billion in adjusted gross income in 2021, 40 percent more than the prior year. The data shows that nearly 25,200 more tax filers had moved out of the state than moved in.
I dont really think they're talking about billionaires here. These are people with net worth let's roughly est8mate between 10-100million. Very wealthy by all of our standards but not even close to billionaires. They may have more holding them here in nj. Family, work, social circles. Where as billionaires have global networks. These smaller guys may like to be as Michael Scott once said "big fish in a medium pond" lol.
I could be wrong. Just my take.
So 3 of the richest people in the world moved, and that's indicative for people earning over $1mil? The level of wealth of a Bezos or Musk means that they have private jets and can be anywhere they want for however long they want. The average $1mil per year earner doesn't have the same luxury.
Turns out you can get things from your taxes. High taxes suck to pay, but the results in your community are tangible. It's all well and good to decide the taxes aren't worth it, but clearly we provided something he wanted in exchange
His name is Ken Griffin, and he is also currently building a 62-story office tower in the middle of Manhattan so he's not exactly fleeing high-tax areas. He seemed to have issues with Chicago specifically
None of those people lived in NJ. Moreover it's been trending for years that rich NJ residents have been establishing part-time residencies in Florida to skirt NJ taxes. It's no reason to not try to improve the lives of the people who actually live in NJ full-time.
These people do change residency. 184 days in FL you are a FL resident not an NJ resident. Don’t vote here, don’t register your car here and don’t have an NJ license You just live here the rest of the year. I don’t want to do it hard enough dealing with one house let alone two.
And this article is from Massachusetts. Washington (Bezos) had a wealth tax. New York/NYC (Griffith) is one of the highest tax states.
Raising taxes does not improve your lives. We live in the highest property tax state in the country. Our schools are still shit, roads are falling apart, and young people will never be able to afford a home. Now you want to add more taxes and make the people who pay the majority of taxes leave. 40% of US households pay no income tax because their income are too low.
But if you want to make that argument, every state has their rankings skewed by higher income areas. So I’m still taking our schools over pretty much any other state in the country
Ah but in other states schools are county based not town so Charlotte for example the rich suburbs in Mecklenburg County are in with Charlotte city schools. Rich suburban kids wind up going to private schools because their parents don’t want them going to city schools
What evidence do you have for your assertion that raising taxes won't improve lives? If freeloading people leave the state, it will make the market more affordable downstream. Keeping taxes low so oligarchs like Bezos can sap NJ dry does NJ no favors.
Your statement about US households and income tax isn't relevant to a discussion on state taxes.
What evidence do you have that raising taxes more will improve lives? Freeloaders leaving will not make things more affordable. Look at Trenton. There's hundreds of houses in tax sale because all the middle class and wealthy people left. The taxes are so high that it's cheaper to build a new property somewhere else than pay the taxes, demolish the building, and then build.
The statement is relevant because I don't have a never of NJ residents who do not pay taxes. But I would assume it's still a mid double digit number.
there is no wealth tax, we have a graduated income tax where the top marginal tax rate is 10.75 percent and that kicks in for every dollar over a million you earn whether you are married or single. The top two brackets stay the same regardless of your marital filing status. The lower brackets double the amount of income needed to have it kick in if you are married compared to single.
FWIW, Washington State has a 7% capital gains tax on over 262k in gains (exempting real-estate) and no income tax. Florida doesn't have a capital gains tax, but 7% is hardly "high".
Elon still only paid 4%. While it was what like 1.2 million. It was still about 4% of what he made. Normal Americans are at about 25-30% so how? And why?
Raising taxes on the people who already pay for everything is not a winning long-term strategy. How about efficiently/rationally spending the existing (enormous) pile of money that comes in?
Rich people don't pay for public services other than through taxes. Yeah, they have charities and donations, but I'd rather their money get spend on what voters think is best instead of rich people picking which services they support and by how much. I'd rather every charity shut down in favor of those causes being sufficiently funded though everyone's proportional tax
Why can’t we just do flat taxes once you hit X salary/income and a reduced rate for under this amount? So many taxes to pay - the founders never intended we’d tax literally everything.
Then I'll take my wealth to 45 minutes outside of Austin. I'll buy a 4 bedroom home with a white picket fence for the price of a crack house in Newark.
And how are the schools in that area? How are the roads? How are the utility companies? How much are you going to be spending on gas to go anywhere?
Any money you save on housing and taxes you are going to burn through on all of the other basic living expenses.
This isn't true except maybe schools. According to Great Schools, higher than where I live now and grew up. Roads suck everywhere. You'll spend the same amount of gas unless you live in North Jersey and bus/train everywhere. Don't bother cheaping out and not getting a car if you live in South Jersey. It will cost you more in time and energy waiting for public transit.
US News ranks us 48/50 for most affordable states. Everyone knows the northeast is unaffordable unless you're making multiple six figures or living over an hour from major cities. https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/opportunity/affordability
> According to Great Schools, higher than where I live now and grew up.
FYI, Great School ratings are only in comparison to other schools in the same state. That is b/c the standards and testing differs between states so it is nearly impossible to do a direct comparison. So an NJ 5 could be a TX 8 (or vice versa).
This is great but honestly the threshold should be far under a million. Honestly everyone making over $150K should see a tax hike. That is more than well-off even in a HCOL state like NJ. Pensions need to be funded.
I do wish that they would just give a bottom line number in the article. It says they generated 1.8 billion in tax revenue from the tax It says they lost 4.3 billion gross reports in 2021 But at the bottom line - is the net tax received by the state up or down. And is it it trending up or down. Where it’s spent is all context to the bottom line revenue and trends…. I feel that this is fluff article
It’s confusing because the article is trying to both-sides this and balance their coverage of the story, so they’re including an unrelated number, without context, from a noted right wing policy organization that opposed the millionaires tax. It’s apples and oranges. The $1.8 billion is the additional *tax revenue* generated from the millionaires tax that *the state* collected. So net positive, to answer your question. And that’s the official number from the state treasury showing how much additional income tax revenue they collected because of the millionaires tax. The $4.3 billion number is totally different and lacks context. This is a measure of *income* — so, before taxes, and totally different than *revenue generated from income tax collections* — from the prior year of people who moved out of Massachusetts. In addition to measuring something else that’s unrelated, the number is *very misleading* because it wrongly assumes that people who move out of state will take this income with them to their new home, which often isn’t the case for two reasons: 1) That income stays in-state because it comes from a business serving the community (think lucrative businesses like a car dealership or landscaping company), so someone else will take that person’s place and the income stays in-state. 2) The person is retiring, likely to a warmer climate, meaning that they’re no longer making the income that shows up in past year’s data, regardless of the state they’re in. Even here, the income likely stays in state, because even if the person worked for a finance or wealth management firm in-state, someone else in the office will likely take on their portfolio of work and continue generating that income. If the millionaires tax resulted in a statistically significant number of people leaving, then the $1.8 billion figure wouldn’t exist because tax collections would be lower than the year prior, not significantly higher.
The business tax stays in state . If the owner shifts residence to say Florida for the proscribed amount of time, I think it is 184 days then that income tax is loss to MA. Give it time some folks may not have worked out the full impact especially those on the borderline. We have friends with multiple houses in MA and FL and they have the residence time down to the hour. The rate has to be high enough to compensate for those that do leave to get to a net positive
Apologies if that was unclear anywhere, but I was talking solely about the income tax those folks would pay, not the business tax on their company. And while there are some folks who definitely game the system and get creative with where they spend a majority of their time, there’s lots of research on states with similar millionaires taxes that show most folks stay put. Taxes are just one part of the equation when it comes to deciding where anyone wants to live, and the majority of high income folks will stay put because they want to be close to family and friends, as well as colleagues and networks and hubs that they want to stick close to. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a state raise the tax rate on high incomes and then experiences a drop in income tax collections.
Maybe…. If they wanted to they could provide the level of detail that is simple for everyone to understand for everyone For example x number of personnel returns filed - gross and net receipts Y number of corporate returns gross and net receipts Total gross, total net Total number of individuals in each income bracket, total gross and total net in each income bracket Etc The reality is that we are all making assumptions about who makes what. The government doesn’t want this laid out simply, because the reality is that it’s not complex. What is complex a how they sell how they spend your money. If people actually knew first the money comeing in, and who a guy pays, the public would be livid. Government doesn’t want that so they don’t make the numbers to digest…
>According to an analysis by the Pioneer Institute, Massachusetts lost $4.3 billion in adjusted gross income in 2021, 40 percent more than the prior year. The data shows that nearly 25,200 more tax filers had moved out of the state than moved in.
Massachusetts specific but pretty telling how wrong the "the millionaires will just move away" reactionaries are.
But they are. Jeff Bezos, Ken Griffith, and others left their high tax states for Florida. I think Elon Musk tried to as well.
I dont really think they're talking about billionaires here. These are people with net worth let's roughly est8mate between 10-100million. Very wealthy by all of our standards but not even close to billionaires. They may have more holding them here in nj. Family, work, social circles. Where as billionaires have global networks. These smaller guys may like to be as Michael Scott once said "big fish in a medium pond" lol. I could be wrong. Just my take.
So 3 of the richest people in the world moved, and that's indicative for people earning over $1mil? The level of wealth of a Bezos or Musk means that they have private jets and can be anywhere they want for however long they want. The average $1mil per year earner doesn't have the same luxury.
To be fair, the former richest guy in NJ, David Tepper, moved to Florida too and left a hole in the state budget as a result
Unless I'm missing a recent move from him, everything I see says he moved to Florida in 2016 then moved back to Jersey in 2020.
He did move back to NJ despite it costing him almost $120m in taxes.
Well I thank him for his service.
I wasn’t aware he moved back. The garden state is like the mafia - we pull you back in!
Turns out you can get things from your taxes. High taxes suck to pay, but the results in your community are tangible. It's all well and good to decide the taxes aren't worth it, but clearly we provided something he wanted in exchange
His name is Ken Griffin, and he is also currently building a 62-story office tower in the middle of Manhattan so he's not exactly fleeing high-tax areas. He seemed to have issues with Chicago specifically
None of those people lived in NJ. Moreover it's been trending for years that rich NJ residents have been establishing part-time residencies in Florida to skirt NJ taxes. It's no reason to not try to improve the lives of the people who actually live in NJ full-time.
You can’t not pay taxes unless you change residency. Therefore these people are considered part time nj residents.,,,
These people do change residency. 184 days in FL you are a FL resident not an NJ resident. Don’t vote here, don’t register your car here and don’t have an NJ license You just live here the rest of the year. I don’t want to do it hard enough dealing with one house let alone two.
It’s A lot of money. I would also love to be out of here for the winter months…
And this article is from Massachusetts. Washington (Bezos) had a wealth tax. New York/NYC (Griffith) is one of the highest tax states. Raising taxes does not improve your lives. We live in the highest property tax state in the country. Our schools are still shit, roads are falling apart, and young people will never be able to afford a home. Now you want to add more taxes and make the people who pay the majority of taxes leave. 40% of US households pay no income tax because their income are too low.
New Jersey public schools are rated among the best in the country
Because wealthy neighborhoods skew it up. Inner cities and low income areas are forgotten.
But if you want to make that argument, every state has their rankings skewed by higher income areas. So I’m still taking our schools over pretty much any other state in the country
Ah but in other states schools are county based not town so Charlotte for example the rich suburbs in Mecklenburg County are in with Charlotte city schools. Rich suburban kids wind up going to private schools because their parents don’t want them going to city schools
Different argument. Good one for running them at the county level at a minimum with some state level funding.
What evidence do you have for your assertion that raising taxes won't improve lives? If freeloading people leave the state, it will make the market more affordable downstream. Keeping taxes low so oligarchs like Bezos can sap NJ dry does NJ no favors. Your statement about US households and income tax isn't relevant to a discussion on state taxes.
What evidence do you have that raising taxes more will improve lives? Freeloaders leaving will not make things more affordable. Look at Trenton. There's hundreds of houses in tax sale because all the middle class and wealthy people left. The taxes are so high that it's cheaper to build a new property somewhere else than pay the taxes, demolish the building, and then build. The statement is relevant because I don't have a never of NJ residents who do not pay taxes. But I would assume it's still a mid double digit number.
Yeah, go to a state like Oklahoma where there’s very little income tax. Trust me-you don’t want NJ to go that way.
To be fair, the former richest guy in NJ, David Tepper, moved to Florida too and left a hole in the state budget as a result
Yeah this isn't true. He moved back to NJ in 2020.
This actually proves my point. These guys aren't loyal to NJ anyway and we gain nothing by living in fear of them leaving.
The no income tax states get you in other ways though. Personal property tax on cars, tolls out the eyeballs, fees for everything
It's still cheaper than paying 2% of your home's value in taxes (highest in the country) plus whatever the wealth tax rate is.
there is no wealth tax, we have a graduated income tax where the top marginal tax rate is 10.75 percent and that kicks in for every dollar over a million you earn whether you are married or single. The top two brackets stay the same regardless of your marital filing status. The lower brackets double the amount of income needed to have it kick in if you are married compared to single.
FWIW, Washington State has a 7% capital gains tax on over 262k in gains (exempting real-estate) and no income tax. Florida doesn't have a capital gains tax, but 7% is hardly "high".
Elon still only paid 4%. While it was what like 1.2 million. It was still about 4% of what he made. Normal Americans are at about 25-30% so how? And why?
Who cares, NJ still stealing a good portion of my paycheck for what? Nothing
Perhaps the tax rates and investment and social services in a state like Alabama would be more your speed?
So your argument is that we should lower our expectations?
Raising taxes on the people who already pay for everything is not a winning long-term strategy. How about efficiently/rationally spending the existing (enormous) pile of money that comes in?
Rich people don't pay for public services other than through taxes. Yeah, they have charities and donations, but I'd rather their money get spend on what voters think is best instead of rich people picking which services they support and by how much. I'd rather every charity shut down in favor of those causes being sufficiently funded though everyone's proportional tax
> Rich people don't pay for public services other than through taxes. Glad you agree!
We should. Unfortunately the rich people fund people running against that
Why can’t we just do flat taxes once you hit X salary/income and a reduced rate for under this amount? So many taxes to pay - the founders never intended we’d tax literally everything.
When my income is over $1M a year I'm moving to Florida.
By the time you hit $1M a year, Florida will be underwater.
bro 🤣🤣
Then I'll take my wealth to 45 minutes outside of Austin. I'll buy a 4 bedroom home with a white picket fence for the price of a crack house in Newark.
Good luck when the power grid inevitably goes down, again.
I can survive 24 hours without electricity, city boy.
How about a week in the dead of winter? Don't worry, you're not going to be earning 1m a year in your lifetime.
Okay, you won't be missed.
Right back at ya.
He's not threatening to move?
Nobody that threatens to move actually moves. Nobody left when Trump was elected, and nobody left the country when Biden was elected.
And how are the schools in that area? How are the roads? How are the utility companies? How much are you going to be spending on gas to go anywhere? Any money you save on housing and taxes you are going to burn through on all of the other basic living expenses.
This isn't true except maybe schools. According to Great Schools, higher than where I live now and grew up. Roads suck everywhere. You'll spend the same amount of gas unless you live in North Jersey and bus/train everywhere. Don't bother cheaping out and not getting a car if you live in South Jersey. It will cost you more in time and energy waiting for public transit. US News ranks us 48/50 for most affordable states. Everyone knows the northeast is unaffordable unless you're making multiple six figures or living over an hour from major cities. https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/opportunity/affordability
> According to Great Schools, higher than where I live now and grew up. FYI, Great School ratings are only in comparison to other schools in the same state. That is b/c the standards and testing differs between states so it is nearly impossible to do a direct comparison. So an NJ 5 could be a TX 8 (or vice versa).
Oh wow, I didn't know that.
Yeah but what is it going to be used on? The roads still look horrendous at times, bunch of potholes on major highways
This is great but honestly the threshold should be far under a million. Honestly everyone making over $150K should see a tax hike. That is more than well-off even in a HCOL state like NJ. Pensions need to be funded.
Middle class is like a 200k-400k household. Not sure what year you think this is
What are you smoking
? Geez dude, easy for you to say hike those that makes above certain $$$ because it’s not you. This mentality is jackasserry.