I Moved to New York to Pay More in Taxes—and I’m Glad I Did
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 information needed to make informed comparisons.
My husband and I lived in my home state of Arkansas together for a little more than five years; like most people, we decided to move for a number of reasons. One was that we could no longer stand the South’s blazing hot summers and were worried about climate change, so we looked for more climate-resilient places to live, which mostly led us up north. We wanted to live somewhere near an Amtrak station with frequent service, near mountains, and we really wanted to buy an older home that we could comfortably afford. We also wanted to leave the South for political and cultural reasons. We landed in central New York.
All that being said, if I had to name the catalyst for the move, it was when I had to write a check for my 2022 Arkansas state income taxes. I was self-employed for most of my time in Arkansas, which meant I frequently owed some amount of taxes at the end of the tax year, and in the spring of 2023 that amount was a little more than $7,000. That was, coincidentally, the amount that the state would soon be giving to individuals who wanted to use tax money to send their children to private school under the newly passed LEARNS Act.
The LEARNS Act gave almost anyone, regardless of income, taxpayer money to use toward private school tuition. I realized the same amount of money I was sending to the state could be used by someone with more money than I had to send their children to a school that promoted teachings I disagreed with, while also robbing the public school system of funds. I simply decided that I didn’t want to live in a state that used its tax dollars—my tax dollars—that way. I wanted to move to a place where my taxes were spent more in line with my values.
It was a clarifying moment. We had lived for years in a very rural part of the state that looked different even from where we live now, near New York’s dairy country. We often had to take our own trash to the dump, our roads fell into disrepair after the slightest winter storm, and the county often relied on private help to fix them. There were knock-down, drag-out fights over even small amounts of tax increases that funded things like my local library. There was no county-funded animal shelter, and animal control was spotty at best, which meant stray and abandoned animals were everywhere, and my husband and I, dog and cat lovers, spent thousands of our own money to rescue animals, spay and neuter pets for people who couldn’t afford it, and send homeless pets to friends around the country.
Getting even basic information about services, and service interruptions, from the county government or local utilities was difficult. I once FOIA-ed information about county water shutoffs from my local water utility and got a large folder with handwritten records. When the pipes burst at my house—for complicated reasons I won’t go into—I called to ask if the water company could shut my water off so that I could have it fixed, and the person I spoke to told me—and I am deadly serious—to find my water meter and “just stick a screwdriver down there.”
I have spent many years complaining about rural Arkansas only because I loved living there and think my neighbors deserve better. But when we finally left the second time, I realized how stressful the daily indignities of life there had been. We live in a place now where things just work. The roads are plowed in winter, they’re repaired in the spring, the local utilities text and email us when there are service interruptions and they repair them quickly, we have a well-funded library system.
Across the board, the services and benefits I get for my tax money outstrip what I got from my former state. I regularly receive booklets in my mailbox with reports from the county government and the county schools. We live near a city, Utica, with a beautiful train with services that can get us to most places in the country, and the DMV is in that train station and is one of the quickest, politest places I have ever been. Utica, which has a third of the population of Arkansas’s state capital, Little Rock, is served by a public transit system that provides nearly three times the annual rides that Little Rock’s does. Hourly wages are higher here, and the safety net provided those who are in need is better.
Moving to New York was the good kind of culture shock. My husband and I are constantly asking each other, “Is it just me, or are the vibes here just … better?” The answer is yes. Together, we have lived in four cities across three states; separately, you can add four more cities and three more states to that list. They vary in their level of taxation and politics, and we have developed a personal metric for assessing the quality of a place, which we call the Potts-Suarez Theory of County Dumps. How easy is it, and how much does it cost, to get rid of your household trash?
In Arkansas, we resorted to piling our own trash into our 2003 Subaru Forester and taking it to the dump on Saturdays, usually spending about $20 a week to do so. Many people in my home county simply burned their own trash in their yards, violating an ordinance to do so because it’s easier and cheaper. In New York State, our trash and recycling services cost half that amount and are reliable, and when we have to make a trip to the county eco-station to dump hazardous waste—we are DIY-ing much of our old house, including removing lead paint—it is open more hours, well organized, clean, and well staffed.
Obviously, this is a very silly and subjective measure. But there are some data points hinting that it’s not just us. The states that rank higher in health outcomes tend to be more progressive states with a higher tax base, while those at the bottom are across the low-tax, low-wage South. Maps look similar for educational attainment, food security, and median income. A recent study ranking states on overall measures of well-being found New York and California in the middle, while the states at the top were a mix of high- and low-tax states, number one being Minnesota, and states at the bottom included much of the mid-South, like Arkansas. Surveys that try to assess happiness find similar results. New York and California are also some of the least affordable states to live in in the U.S., but the supply-side housing folks ought to know that some of that is because the supply is outpaced by demand: People want to live in these states.
Some of my problems are particular to the South, which, as my colleague Perry Bacon Jr. wrote last month, has long been antidemocratic and especially focused on disenfranchising Black citizens. “Whether the United States overall is a liberal democracy or can become one again, the states in the South are at best electoral democracies and are veering toward electoral autocracies,” he wrote, and he details the ways those states restrict freedoms of their residents and liberal voters’ abilities to shape their own cities and communities.
There is, at base, a set of questions each state, or city, or country, has to organize itself around. How can we form a community? How do we create a good life for the people who live here? Most people don’t truly have any way to assess how their own communities are answering that question compared to others. There are very few objective measures on which we can rank states on how nice it is to live there—and they would be imperfect at best because different people value different things. Taxes are one objective measure, but taxes have long been framed as a burden weighing on people, not as an investment we’re all making so that the place we’ve chosen to live is as good as it can be.
Viewed as an investment, the basic level of taxation can fund the services that free up time and energy for its residents to work, care for their families, enjoy their leisure, make art, and build cool things together because they’re less worried about basic things like how hard it is to dispose of the household trash. States that don’t invest in their public infrastructure and well-being are shifting the burdens to individuals.
The great things about California and New York are inextricable from these states’ tax systems. But the vast majority of political writers who question taxes in places like Washington, D.C., New York, or California—or who hold up places like Texas as an example of housing abundance, have never seen what that looks like for the people who live in those places on a daily basis. The lack of taxes, the lack of investment, can take the form of all manner of imposition, from a county dump that is too expensive for people to use to inadequate reproductive health care, to never knowing if your vote will be counted. From 30,000 feet in the air, these can look like separate issues. At ground level, they’re all born from the neglect that comes in the lack of real investment. I know exactly what I’m getting from my taxes in New York. And I suspect other low-tax boosters know what they’re getting too, which is why they haven’t moved en masse to places like Arkansas.
