California Losing One Taxpayer Every Minute as Residents Flee Failed Policies
“Florida welcomes a new taxpayer about every two minutes while California loses one about every minute, according to new data.”
California’s steady decline has been measured in many ways over the last decade, but new IRS data puts a hard number on the exodus. The state is now losing one taxpayer every minute, a stark indicator of a state in slow-motion collapse while its competitors surge ahead.
The Center Square notes the scale of the problem clearly:
“Florida welcomes a new taxpayer about every two minutes while California loses one about every minute, according to new data.”
The Washington Examiner, citing the same IRS-based analysis by the National Taxpayers Union Foundation, highlights that California ranks at the bottom nationally.
“The states losing taxpayers most frequently are California, New York, and Illinois. California loses a taxpayer every 1 minute and 44 seconds.”
The contrast with states that prioritize lower taxes, lighter regulation, and functional governance could not be sharper. Florida, Texas, and North Carolina are gaining taxpayers faster than any other state. That trend is not an accident. According to Andrew Wilford of the National Taxpayers Union Foundation:
“Welcoming people moving from other states means more job creators, more innovators, and a larger tax base from the economic activity that they generate.”
California’s leadership insists the problem can be solved around the margins with tweaks such as easing zoning restrictions, but taxpayer flight is telling a different story. People do not uproot their lives over a single issue. They flee when the cumulative effect of taxes, regulations, crime, cost of living, and quality of life reaches a breaking point.
IRS data shows how dramatic the financial impact has become. The Center Square reports:
“California saw a lost 9 billion dollars in taxpayer funds during 2018, this number dramatically increased to 29 billion dollars lost in 2020.”
Florida, by comparison, experienced an explosion in tax revenue, gaining up to 39 billion dollars in 2020 alone from new residents.
These numbers represent more than spreadsheets. They represent a vote of no confidence in the direction of America’s largest blue state. California’s political leadership can keep pretending the problem is superficial, but taxpayers are sending a message every sixty seconds. They are choosing to leave. The only question left is how long the state can pretend not to notice.
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
And now they’ll vote for the same policies they fled, never making the connection.
That’s what happened to NM and Colorado. The locusts destroyed their states and then cast their eye on something new to completely devour.
Also NH and Vermont.
Massholes ruined NH
NH, now known (sadly) as Northern Massachusetts.
That’s why we left. Our families were in VT before it was a republic and Massholes, CT, NY, NJ people moved in, forced it from Conservative Libertarian to the left and jacked up housing and living costs with the conjoining tax increases especially property to the point we couldn’t afford to live there anymore.
It’s not clear to me that New Mexico was ever even mildly conservative.
I will say NC will become MORE screwed as a result. Liberals are likely heading there. We call Asheville the Olympia of the South. #shithole.
Tennessee is getting redder. I’ve met so many refugees since coming and they are more conservative than the locals. The locals are pissed because we’ve got money and are driving the price of real estate.
And that’s why they should stay and fixed their own crap.
In the past I would have agreed with you but FL showed us that is not the case with the people fleeing blue states now. FL used to be a purple state and the southern part of it was almost solid blue but no longer. DeSantis won by 1.5% over a black homo crack addict his first election! Last election it was a landslide for him.
That makes sense since liberals, who seem to enjoy being miserable, almost always double down. Misery is a welcome opportunity to virtue signal. The exclamation “Look at how much in taxes I’m now paying!” has two very different meanings depending on whether one is liberal or conservative. This suggests more conservatives than liberals are fleeing.
Not all of us.
Not necessarily. Wife and I finally fled VT for NC. We brought or Conservative values with us.
It depends. I live in a university town in Texas, and all of the California refuges I have met are connected to the university in one way or another (most are professors).
Every single one of them complain about California’s high crime and tax rates. And every single one of them worship the ground Gavin Newsom and his Communist Party walk on and are convinced California’s problems are due to Republican perfidy, evil corporations, or (the default excuse) “racism”.
TBF: I don’t believe these nut jobs represent all of California’s refugees. Academia tends to attract more than its fair share of genocidal maniacs.
Quite a few of them will bring their retarded votes with them and help destroy their new town and state too.
Never mind their liberal women with daddy issues will seek validation through local election then do everything in their power to wreck them.
“Florida welcomes a new taxpayer about every two minutes while California loses one about every minute, according to new data.”
Extrapolate that math to calculate the eventual gain/loss of congressional districts, and by extension gain/loss of electoral college votes, and the blue states will be in for a very rude awakening very soon.
It’s OK, they’ll just gerrymander harder.
When virtually no conservatives remain, they won’t need to gerrymander, but they’ll also have fewer seats in the House.
Until #Resistance Federal judges simply gives blue states whatever number of Congressional seats they need to keep control. If fake ballots are totally legal why not fake Congressional seats?
Last time they just fudged the numbers with a modifier…
And turn red areas blue, or at least purple because they’re too dumb to change the way they vote.
The problem is that elections mean little to nothing in California. DMV automatic voter registration no id presentation voting and mail-in ballots guarantee outcomes for the Democrats, Even without this the population is concentrated in the cities and the cities of America vote Democrat.
If it wasn’t for illegals CA wouled lose about five seats.
Notice the article is about taxpayers not people. The problem is quite a number of illegals do not pay taxes living under the table on cash. Larger families burden the schools and medical facilities without paying for them.
I wonder which of the states hemorrhaging population will be the first to try to institute an exit of tax?
I know that New York chases after wealthy people that leave their state. They were after Rush Limbaugh for years, even though he had broken off all connections with New York City. If I recall correctly, he even stopped using his New York studio for occasional broadcast because he didn’t want to set foot in the state. They would try to charge him income tax for the few days per year that he would be there.
I remember Rush talking about it. They wanted to audit him every year to see if he essentially flew over the state and tax him a prorated amount on that time. I think it’s why Hannity left NYC for Palm Beach after years of saying he was going to. I think it was contractual stuff that kept him in NY.
Didn’t CA float an exit tax idea? I think I remember it being discussed and it immediately got shot down as un-Constitutional.
The headline and second sentence are present tense: “is now losing…every minute”. Yet the quoted supporting evidence is tax data from 2018 and 2020. Isn’t it more accurate to say “Now we have learned that seven years ago CA lost one taxpayer every minute.”
Which state is #8?
So, at one taxpayer lost every ~100 seconds, that comes out to about 300,000 each year. While that’s less than 1% of Cali’s population, it likely represents an outsized proportion of its tax revenue since the movers are most likely skewed heavily toward the high earners.
And, as noted above, the article specifies that Cali is losing ~taxpayers~ at that rate. I don’t know what percentage of the ~39,000,000 [2000 census] paid taxes. Or how “taxpayer” is defined. In a household of 4, how many taxpayers are there? Does the term include everyone in the household?
Whoever files is the taxpayer. It’s not the entire household. For example, husband and wife are filing jointly; that’s two people.
Some people have told me that California’s GDP is so large that losing population, businesses, and even the oil industry, doesn’t matter much. Even shrunken, the state will be much larger and have more economic activity than most other states.
This, I think is true, but when I was a kid, essentially the same argument was made that GEneral Motors could not possibly fail- they controlled almost 50% of the market in the U.S. and a significant percentage of the world market. Well, in 2008 GM went bankrupt.
I suspect the majority of the folks fleeing NY, CA, IL are not the vanguard of a lefty wokiesta invasion. Instead these are likely the productive people who see the writing on the wall and are ‘getting out while the getting is good’. Probably an 80/20 split of center/right normies to wokiestas.
You can name any number of celebrity industrialists (Bezos, Gates, Reid Hoffman, Tom Steyer) as proof that being “productive” does not preclude voting (and donating) like an idiot.
Meh, I suspect the average small business owner and/or retiree or whatever moving out of some blue city due to increasing crime, bad schools, poor public services, greedy/grasping public employee unions, high and going higher tax burden and too much insane regulatory into every aspect of life is less inclined to bring that crap with them. The non wealthy simply can’t afford the luxury beliefs b/c they lack the means to avoid the direct personal costs of implementing them. Walled estates and private security on duty 24/7 is expensive. Even a gated community is unaffordable to most folks.
California is infecting the US at a rate of one infection every minute.
This is not good.
Mine the border.
Me and my wife were born in the late 50s in California. I am from SoCal and she is from the Bay Area. We met in college in the 70s. We left with our two sons in 96 because business moved me to the east coast. Both of us and our sons are conservative. The move did not change our views.
Most of my family has left California but some of my cousins are still in SoCal. My wife’s brother and one of her sister is still in California. Other of her sisters have moved out, but most cousins still are in California. In both sides of family we have Dems and Republicans no matter where they are.
Similar story for different reasons. The libs in my extended family all have late-stage TDS.
I am honestly surprised that the outflow is that slow
So? For every taxpayer who leaves, the Peoples Democratic Republic of Californian will print up a half-dozen fake ballots to take their place – and import a few illegal aliens as a “bonus”.