STUMP » Articles » Taxing Tuesday: NY Tax Revenues Down, Population Down » 23 April 2019, 04:37

Where Stu & MP spout off about everything.

Taxing Tuesday: NY Tax Revenues Down, Population Down  

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23 April 2019, 04:37

Well, this isn’t a good sign. For me.

New York state tax revenues plummet by $3.7 billion

New York state tax revenues fell by $3.7 billion, or 4.7 percent, last year — the largest collapse since the 9/11 attacks — but officials downplayed the significance.

Trying to find a bright side, state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli said things could have been worse since a surge in collections last month staved off an even steeper drop.
….
The primarily culprit was a 6.6 percent decrease in personal income tax revenues, which came in at $48.1 billion — $3.4 billion less than the previous year.

DiNapoli spokesman Brian Butry cited sweeping changes to the federal tax code, including a new $10,000 cap on state and local taxes that could be claimed on federal returns.

Gov. Cuomo’s budget office agreed. Spokesman Freeman Klopett said many filers shifted payments to 2017 so they could claim the more generous deductions under the old federal tax code, “creating the appearance of a drop” this year.

Hmmmm.

This is the Comptroller’s official press release on this result:

Tax receipts for State Fiscal Year 2018-19 declined $3.7 billion, or 4.7 percent, from the previous year to $75.6 billion, according to the year-end state cash report released today by State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli. The state ended its fiscal year on March 31 with a General Fund balance of $7.2 billion, higher than recent projections but a decline of $2.2 billion from the prior fiscal year.

…..
All Funds tax receipts in December and January were a combined $3.2 billion below the earlier projections, primarily due to personal income taxes. With stronger-than-expected receipts in March, tax collections ended the fiscal year $601.4 million higher than DOB’s February projections, but more than $2.3 billion lower than initially anticipated, with almost all of the variance in personal income tax.

Personal income tax receipts for the year totaled $48.1 billion, a decline of $3.4 billion, or 6.6 percent, from 2017-18, primarily due to a decrease in estimated payments. Consumption and use taxes rose to $17.4 billion, up $645 million, or 3.9 percent, from the previous year. Business tax receipts were $7.9 billion, an increase of 10.4 percent. Miscellaneous Receipts totaled $31.2 billion, $3.2 billion more than initially planned, in part because of unanticipated monetary settlements of more than $1 billion. All Funds receipts for the year totaled $168.1 billion, including $61.3 billion in federal funds.

Whee.

It would be interesting if this paper: “TAXATION AND MIGRATION: EVIDENCE AND POLICY IMPLICATIONS” has something relevant to say:

ABSTRACT
In this article, we review a growing empirical literature on the effects of personal taxation on the
geographic mobility of people and discuss its policy implications. We start by laying out the
empirical challenges that prevented progress in this area until recently, and then discuss how
recent work have made use of new data sources and quasi-experimental approaches to credibly
estimate migration responses. This body of work has shown that certain segments of the labor
market, especially high-income workers and professions with little location-specific human
capital, may be quite responsive to taxes in their location decisions. When considering the
implications for tax policy design, we distinguish between uncoordinated and coordinated tax
policy. *We highlight the importance of recognizing that mobility elasticities are not exogenous,
structural parameters. They can vary greatly depending on the population being analyzed, the size
of the tax jurisdiction, the extent of tax policy coordination, and a range of non-tax policies.*
While migration responses add to the efficiency costs of redistributing income, we caution
against over-using the recent evidence of (sizeable) mobility responses to taxes as an argument
for less redistribution in a globalized world.

It’s a lot easier to, say, escape a specific city (as in how I left NYC) than an entire state; it’s easier to leave a state than an entire country; and so forth.

Now, this is a meta-study. Table 1 has some interesting collection of results focusing on different subpopulations (inventors are a popular group) in different countries. And one notes that they find certain groups, that tend to generate their income (as opposed to being a rent-taker) via inventions or investments, to be rather mobile. What a shock.

And people are leaving New York, and my county:

The mass exodus of residents leaving New York State is not exclusive to upstate, and has spread to the New York City, Westchester and Long Island.

The U.S. Census Bureau’s 2018 population estimates are out, and the numbers show that nearly 50,000 New Yorkers left the Empire State, with a notable increase in Nassau and Westchester counties.

….
Westchester reported a loss of 1,700 residents to bring the population to approximately 967,600. An additional 1,300 residents reported a move out of the area the previous year. Rockland, Dutchess and Orange counties reported slight gains, while Putnam County recorded a slight loss in residents.

New York City lost 439,523 of its 8,400,000 residents: 18,000 in Queens, 13,500 in Brooklyn, 7,500 in the Bronx and 1,000 in Manhattan. Staten Island recorded a gain of 663.

And there are plenty of old expenses that they need to tax us to cover. Whee.

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