Sunday, September 04, 2016

Voting With Your Feet

. Some of us believe that immigrants are voting with their feet when they choose to come to the US rather than stay where they were born (we usually ignore people who choose other nations than the US to migrate to). Some conservatives believe in "voting with your feet"; the idea that people will move from heavily taxed and regulated states to more lightly taxed and regulated ones.  They point to the gains the southern and western states have made over the years as evidence this works.  And some point to migration from California to Idaho or Texas as examples.

Given the continued disparities among states on many measures, and my liberal bias/skepticism of low tax/regulation policies I'm not convinced. Recently the NYTimes did a piece on a subset of migration: the migration of college students from one state to another.  Lyman Stone picks up on that study and expands into an interesting  discussion here.

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