I Moved to New York to Pay More in Taxes—and I’m Glad I Did

I wasn’t getting the bang for my buck in my red-state redoubt. But if I hadn’t moved, I might never have found out how good it could get.

At last week’s WelcomeFest, Matt Yglesias, the longtime blogger turned centrist Substacker, moderated a panel with two Democratic members of Congress from big blue states—Tom Suozzi, who represents part of Long Island, New York, and Adam Gray, who hails from California’s San Joaquin Valley. He ended up making a remark that immediately struck me. I’ve been thinking about it for more than a week.

“The problem for Democrats is that most people see great things about California and about New York, but they don’t think of them as places where government is functioning well,” he said. “The taxes are relatively high, and it’s not obvious that people are getting anything extra for it.” He asked how Democrats could make outcomes better for people in these high-tax states.

The reason this statement rang my bells is that I moved to New York almost three years ago, and taxes were a big reason why. My then partner—now husband—and I decided to move here from Arkansas. That’s right: We wanted to pay more taxes. And I’ll tell you why.

It is true that New York and California have some of the highest income tax rates and estimated share of personal income residents pay in all taxes when property, sales, and local taxes are taken into account. I’m not sure what evidence Yglesias was considering when he said it wasn’t clear what people were getting from their high taxes—or what benefit he specifically thought those taxes were failing to deliver. But then, it’s not always easy to evaluate what bang we’re getting for the buck. How do we measure the effectiveness of the government? These are the questions I found myself asking.

On one level, people experience their taxation in a personal way: There is an amount of money withheld from our paychecks or paid to their state finance departments (or refunded to them) every spring. That is also, usually, how they experience government services, or services largely subsidized or regulated by the government: who decides their county or city’s operations, how transparent are they, how reliable are their utilities, what is a trip to the DMV like? For the most part, they’re only paying individual taxes and living in one state at a time.

Indeed, most people spend the vast majority of their lives in one state, and they’ll spend their working lives paying only one state’s income tax. People don’t make interstate moves that often: The Harvard University Joint Center for Housing Studies calculated in 2020 that about 13 percent of Americans move each year, and only about 14 percent of those moves are across state lines. Most people stay local. Of the people who move, most move for personal reasons having to do with jobs and family—or the chance to buy a new home instead of renting. Which is to say: Most people can’t make a real assessment on what they’re getting for their taxes on an individual level because they lack the........

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