They're not 'hospitable,' they're 'advantageous' due to being lower tax rates. If anything, lower tax rates make places less 'hospitable' in the long run.

Those states will eventually either kill the golden goose or make themselves unattractive for the next big industry. California for most of the 20th century was a place where the government was well managed and efficient, wasn’t afraid to make big investments in infrastructure and education, and made it easy to build stuff without too much hassle. Texas and Florida kind of fit that niche today, but both are a shadow of what California used to be.

>This is probably good in some sense - you can argue that it's not healthy for states like CA to "own" so much of GDP end-to-end

So a state invests in educating its residents, only for other states to reap the economic benefits?

> e.g., Wyoming

Wyoming is an interesting case with Higher Ed. It's actually the legislature that runs UW. There isn't a regent board or some such thing. Hence, with many other priorities, the Cowboys don't get that much time in the minds of their bosses.

It's one of the many many wrinkles that come along with the many college football issues these days. Any formation of a players union or draft or much of any real professionalization of the sport has to go through so many different governance formations (regents, governors, the Catholic Church, etc). As such, the many issues with college ball are likely to continue for a long time and fester.

> does it mean that more tech hubs pop up elsewhere because in the long haul, people probably prefer to work and invest close to home?

That's why Seattle ended up with a software industry presence, isn't it?

It doesn't have to be this way, and it wasn't at some points in the past for different states. Seems like the sources keep forgetting what made them both sources and sinks.

Personally I'd much rather live in the places where wealth is created, instead of the resorts where wealthy people retire to enjoy a life of leisure

") and different states are good at giving them a hospitable place to live"

Every state offers wealthy people a good place to live - the suggestion that somehow this is a trade off is very wrong.

This has a lot to do with taxes.

California imports it's current entrepreneurs because it chased the previous generations of them away. I was a fourth generation Californian, was...

I know one literally one person in my highschool graduating class who stayed behind. Sure the older generation are still left for the most part, still not admitting they did anything to cause the situation, but the young and ambitious have all left.

Think about that the fact that the entire population of a place has basically been replaced in under a generation, and with people who are chasing dollars and clout not people who are building communities. (And no this isn't about immigrants, Cali was always full of people from everywhere, it's about the personality that it attracts now.)

We all left and built other communities and business elsewhere because the place quite clearly told us we were not wanted there.

I'm not sure why people keep repeating fabricated GDP like it's some measure of success, especially when its completly measured on non-tangible products like the California economy.

Cali compared to Cali 40/50/100 years ago is wasteland and it pisses me off every day.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding your suggestion, but shares are already treated as ordinary income when they vest (when the shares are released to you and you first gain the right to sell them).

If a company pays you $1M of shares, the IRS treats it exactly the same as if you were paid $1M of cash and you used it to buy the shares. The capital gains work the same too: you pay capital gains tax on the difference in value between when you receive the shares and when you sell them. That’s how it already works.

That depends on your audience. If you want to move somewhere that's about to have an influx of income tax, you'd head to the states with higher income tax rates + income inflows. For actual wealth migration, that's probably a lot more ephemeral since sales tax tends to be regressive and the wealthy keep their money in investments.

FL is the same timezone as NY, and closer to fly to, and a non-trivial percent have moved only in terms of tax residency, not in terms of how they live their life. In practice "wealth moved to Florida" in these cases is "wealthy people have a home there as part of their overall portfolio of properties."

For a cohort of people who are on the road for work 25% of the time and/or own 2-5 homes, the concept of primary residence is mostly just a legal term. Can they sign a tax return to NYS/NYC tax authorities that they spent 183 days outside the state/city? Lots of people cheat on their taxes.

Therefore there's a wide spectrum of gray in terms of rich NYers "moving to Florida".

First guy I talked to at an NYC tech conference yesterday gave me a business card with his Miami work address (and NYC phone number..) after spending 5 minutes talking about how lived in the same NYC hood.

I know several NYers at/near retirement who plan to: sell NYC primary residence, buy a residence in Florida (change IDs, etc), then after 1 year of seasoning rent back a place in NYC they plan to spend as close to the 182 days/year in NYC that keeps them in tax compliance.

I was under the impression a big part of it relates to Florida bankruptcy law allowing individuals to discharge debts without losing a significant amount of their assets.

See: https://www.floridabar.org/public/consumer/pamphlet008/

At a glance, it looks like Chapter 7 bankruptcy is what I was remembering. There are significant exemptions for property, and the more recent amendments to the law to protect against abuse by wealthy individuals are laughably based on income.

It looks pretty easy to buy up a bunch of property in Florida, live there for two years to become eligible for the property exemptions, then declare Chapter 7 to wipe away outstanding debts with minimal-to-no losses.

Of course, respondents are free to correct me if I've misinterpreted something. My initial thought was based on hearsay, and my interpretation was based off quick skimming :)

I was actually just going to ask this same question. Florida has astronomical home insurance rates due to hurricanes. I'm surprised to see wealthy people moving there given that they'll probably own property and pay an exorbitant premium for insurance. It seems like a bad investment if nothing else.

It's a retirement destination for elderly people from the northeast?

Florida is always #1 because it's the preferred destination of retirees. Old people have more money.

It's sunny. As people get older they want the warmer weather. It's the retirement area of the US.

I'm a snow person that could not imagine life without 4 seasons, but as I get older I'm starting to 'get it' a bit.

It also doesn't take a lot of people for those transfers to show up in big numbers.

Sea-front, or mid-sea properties for most of the state.

Used to be cost of living for the average person, now its network effect and maybe beaches for the wealthy. Both Texas and Florida have generous creditor protections, but Texas lets you keep up to two horses, mules, or donkeys with food and riding equipment too (which is kinda cool in a state that has very little else going for it).

Florida migration boom fades as rising costs push residents out - https://www.axios.com/local/tampa-bay/2026/04/24/florida-aff... - April 24th, 2026

Per Apollo Group, ~31% of wealth is owned by the 70+ cohort, and they move to the sunbelt to retire and die usually.

31% of Wealth Owned by People Over 70 - https://www.apolloacademy.com/31-percent-of-wealth-owned-by-... - December 7th, 2025

~230k people die every year in Florida for reference.

https://usafacts.org/answers/what-are-the-leading-causes-of-...

(overall, ~2M people 55+ die every year in the US, ~5k per day)

Florida is a great state to declare bankruptcy in as they have a homestead exemption so they don't take your house. If you're a piece of shit that runs scammy businesses this a great place to move to.

Overall this isn't really a bad thing - if people want to vote with their feet then have at it. California continues to be a nice place to live and do business (non-competes) so I'm sure people will continue to live there. Everyone else can have Texas, Florida, and Tennessee and all of the, uh, benefits of living in those places and interacting with those state and local governments.

It's worse than that..

the numbers in the chart, for instance, are from 2023.

People vote with their feet. This shouldn't be a negative. Some people don't want to be over taxed and over regulated in places like CA and NY, so they move to states they see as fitting their needs/culture better.

What we really need is a federal law that says states can't entice businesses to move or stay in some place using monetary bribes in the form of company-specific tax cuts. Reducing this manipulation could help tax revenues instead of states competing to be lowest bidder.

Pretty sure Medicaid is funded by both. California expanded it to cover more, probably because of the wealth inequality in that state.

So, the source of the problem isn't federal, its wealth inequality.

Wall street and silicon valley folks are not as well liked outside those bubbles as those in the bubbles might think...

I think you're ignoring the role of capital gains taxes, borrowing against assets, offshore tax shelters, outsized political influence, and the cannibalization of public good for private gain.

many billionaires don't pay income (wages) tax because they come from family money inheritance and income is from investments or maybe shares of companies they head, rather than wages, on which to pay income tax. And income tax from shares and capital gains is less than wages tax. I agree they shouldn't be taxed twice, but the way we are taxed is not straight-forward.

Affordability can still matter for rich people. Isolated rich areas end up being very artificial, which is maybe not the environment they want to live in. Or maybe they're raising families. They might want to be somewhere their children can afford once they become adults without having to rely on their parents.

If you genuinely think that California or New York are anywhere even approaching "communism" then I have to question where you got that information, and for that matter your definition of "communism".

Truman quote never gets old...

"Socialism is a scare word they have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years."

Communism being inter-changable as the vast majority of the time the people using them pejoratively couldn't define either one correctly.

Edit: the people who can't define communism or socialism must be angry with me.

Good. Who cares? Billionaires in California created <3% of the jobs and now that they're gone, that's a niche small business owners can fill right back up. Hooray!

The sooner we treat billionaires as cost centers the better.

Clearly before we were against single engineer unicorns we were for them. Then the billionaires fled in terror...

TLDR: F*** billionaires

Edit: single commas think they're gonna be three commas by enabling them. Tee hee. They'll see. Oh wait, it's 2026, they'll never learn, the Singularity will happen first.

Learn what communism is before talking about it.