Mobility

[jonathankaplan]

I ask that only those who have lived in North America answer this poll, and then, only for the period of residence on that continent. Please?....smile....

Comments

[michaelsullivan]

I had a few issues with answering some of your questions. Songmonk hits on some of them.

I wasn't sure if I should count moving just because I moved along with my parents, or only since I was an adult. I'd bump up a category in no. of moves, and down one in years/move if we include all my forced moves as a child.

More critical was the decision about what would make me move. Regional social differences would matter more to me than many of the things you mentioned, although some of that is "urban vs. suburban" more than "NE vs. wherever". It's also really hard to detangle the influences. I have a probable move coming up in the next few years, and family is a big driver in that my wife is really unhappy here and part of the reason I'm serious about a job switch is the family business dynamic.

Taxes also have a lot of context. OTOH it's a lot easier to changes states, so it would take a lower tax hit to make that important. But my state tax burden is pretty low right now. Increasing it 50% would make very little difference in my standard of living, while increase the Fed tax by 50% would be outgrageous. Also, what the government is doing with the money makes a huge difference in how much tax I'm willing to pay. If I agreed with the goals of most government iniatives and did nnot think the execution particularly wasteful, I could deal with fairly high taxes. OTOH, I don't think it's possible for me to feel that at the tax level we already have (federal) let alone 50% higher. BTW, if you're talking about total tax burden, the Feds can't make it 200% higher. They already control more than 33% of GDP as it stands. So if they even go 100% higher, they are pretty close to making you "like a serf" unless you are superrich. Somewhere around 180% would mean that every aspect of your economic life was controlled by the government in some fashion. Sounds like I'm moving tomorrow -- if they'll still let me, even though the bar for leaving the country is *much* higher than the bar for leaving the state.

State taxes, OTOH, would probably not really make me a 10 at 300% but that was as high as you went. I thought that was closer to my real annswer of around 400% than "I wouldn't leave over taxes" because even a 400% increase in state taxes wouldn't make me live like a serf.

For me the real kick is what difference in tax load would make me move to a state or country that is otherwise only marginally dispreferred or equal to where I live now. For state to state, I'd say around 20-25% of total income (including unrealized cap gain). For country to country, probably 40-50% of total income.

It seems odd because I might have left the US over civil liberty issues, and surely to god, unless we became actually stalinist, a 40% drop in my effective income would make a much greater difference in my day to day life than habeus corpus.

But values matter, and things like habeus corpus and no torture, etc. really do matter to my sense of societal responsibility, and maybe make as much difference to my overall feeling of satisfaction with my life as a big gain/drop in income.