America’s “Atlas Shrugged” Moment Has Already Arrived, New IRS Data Show
“In other words, the geese with the golden eggs are flying away,” writes economist Daniel Mitchell, referring to the IRS data.
Last September, billionaire Ken Griffin announced he was pulling up stakes and moving Citadel—his gigantic hedge fund—from Chicago to Miami.
The Windy City was out of control, he told Bloomberg, something that dawned on him after a colleague made a coffee run and was robbed by a thief who put “a gun to his head.”
It’s no secret that Griffin’s exit is part of a much larger migration taking place across America.
Data show that several populous blue states—California, New York, and Illinois among them—have been losing population and companies for years. In 2021 Forbes wrote about “leftugees” fleeing blue states for red ones. A few years before that, a headline in The Hill touched on “the great exodus out of America’s blue cities.”
New IRS data, however, show the speed with which blue states are losing taxpayers—and their adjusted gross income (AGI)—is increasing. A recent Wall Street Journal analysis found that more than 100,000 people left Illinois in 2021, taking with them some $11 billion in AGI, nearly double its 2019 total. For New York it was $24.5 billion, an increase of more than 150 percent from 2019. California, meanwhile, saw its AGI loss ($29 billion) more than triple since 2019.
That people are migrating from these states is important. But who is migrating is equally important, and the data paint a bleak picture for these states. Taxpayers giving up on the Prairie State and the Empire State made about $35,000 more per year than new arrivals. For Florida, the data are even more stark. The average income for a new arrival to the Sunshine State was roughly $150,000—more than double those leaving.
“In other words, the geese with the golden eggs are flying away,” writes economist Daniel Mitchell, referring to the IRS data.
Going Off the Rails
Needless to say, these data do not bode well for the future of these states. But not everyone is concerned.
The Atlantic accepts the reality that a major migration is underway, one that undercuts the conventional wisdom that “Democratic states are the future,” but rejects the idea that they are “dying.”
“New York City isn’t some dystopian wasteland where no one can see their future,” writes Jerusalem Demsas.
Demsas may be right, but it’s hard to deny there is a dystopian character to what we’re witnessing in many major US cities—including surging crime, failing schools, and social unrest.
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