Live from Music Row, Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio for another edition of Crom’s Crommentary.
CROM CARMICHAEL:
Michael, there is a very interesting article in The Wall Street Journal called The Blue State Exodus Accelerates. And Michael, in the past, I’ve said that when Donald Trump was president, he had a lot of good policies but he did not change paradigms.
There was one paradigm that he did change, and that is when the Republicans eliminated the tax deduction for wealthy people in states that have income taxes, the higher ones are blue states, what that did was it was supposed to essentially force or encourage the states to curtail their spending and to curtail their taxes. And they did neither.
And so consequently, what you have is you have states like New York, California, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Illinois, those are the five listed and they’re all seeing people leave their states. But each year the number of people leaving is increasing and the dollar amount of income that’s leaving those states is increasing every year.
And now it’s increasing by a pretty substantial amount. And so that is a paradigm change. The Democrats had vowed to repeal that and they couldn’t get enough of their own members who think that people who are making a million dollars shouldn’t be able to get a federal tax deduction on their state income taxes.
And so consequently they weren’t able to do that when they had the power to do so. I don’t know whether or not that particular part of the tax code was part of the 2017 tax bill because the 2017 tax bill apparently expires in 2025. I don’t know if that’s the beginning of 2025 or the end.
But the tax cuts that were passed by Trump and the Republicans, do have an expiration date. Whether or not this particular non-tax deduction has an expiration date, I do not know. But what I do know is that the blue states are hemorrhaging higher-income people at an accelerating rate.
And that is the definition of a paradigm change and so it’ll be interesting to see how that plays out for the states. Now, as in a related point in California, I was reading this morning about in California the cost of rent that is skyrocketing now, even though people are exiting California there’s still a shortage of housing.
And we have a shortage of housing because politicians in California make it very difficult and very expensive to get zoning and to build new construction. There’s a story about a woman who is trying to get her Ph.D. and she is living in a house with six other roommates.
She’s paying the cheapest of all the roommates. She’s paying $963 a month. Now she has six other roommates. It says here that they’re defining it as two of the seven spaces that they use as bedrooms are unheated and unpermitted.
She pays $963, nearly half of her take-home pay for the smallest of all of the rooms. And then the article goes on to say that in California, the reason that rents are so high is there’s no new construction. So here you have politicians who scream and yell about the cost of living in California, but then their own policies have caused the cost of living in California to go higher.
So you have this mental block on the part of the Left where they can’t understand why high tax rates are driving their citizens who earn a lot of money. And who work very hard to do so driving them out of the state and then they’re making it more, even more, difficult for those people without higher incomes to have a reasonable standard of living and a reasonable place to live.
And it’s just gonna be fascinating to see what happens over the next two or three years because if the marginal tax rate were to expire, but this non-tax deduction was to stay then the acceleration of higher income people will even go faster in these blue states. It’s an amazing thing to see people who are so locked up mentally that they can’t make an adjustment.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this Crommentary:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Construction Worker” by Jeriden Villegas.
