Deep in the heart of taxes - NYPOST.com

Deep in the heart of taxes
Why I won't move to New York

By ERIC TORBENSON

Last Updated: 3:38 AM, December 26, 2010

Posted: 11:21 PM, December 25, 2010

New York, I love you — but I can’t make the math work.

Like lots of media professionals (and fashion mavens, artists, musicians, et al.), I’ve penciled out the numbers for what it would mean to take a job in New York City. There’s barely enough room on the back of the envelope for subtracting the double-dose income tax hit from the city and state, and that’s before even adjusting for cost of living.

That’s one of the reasons I’m in Dallas. You know, Texas, the state that parlayed this year’s census data into four new House seats — pinching the two lost by the Empire State — because people actually want to live here.

Lots of Texas professionals love New York this way: fly in for $200 round trip, suck down the city’s beefy marrow of culture for a weekend and jet back to live cheap and pay no income tax. It’s all the pleasure and we keep our treasure.

Folks are voting with their pocketbooks; between 2000 and 2008, $846 million of New York’s personal income saddled up and jingle-jangled down to the Lone Star State.

Nobody’s saying New York’s lost appeal from a career standpoint — it’s still the epicenter of finance, media, law and all that. It’s the paycheck crunch that can turn an offer of a lifetime into No Sale.

The figures work this way on a pitch to come live in the Big Apple: You can get a 17% raise, but you’ll still take home less pay compared to that Texas job. But I hear the rent is cheap, right?

Mayor Michael Bloomberg laid it out after the census beat-down. “Unless we make this an attractive state to do business in and to live in, people are going to continue to move out,” he said. “We have to reverse that trend.”

It’s no sweat for 10-figure-net-worth Bloomberg to say his city and state overtax. It’s worth perspiring when professionals who earn into six figures give New York City the finger to live large in Dallas, Atlanta or Phoenix.

And forget the idea that a place like Dallas is all belt buckles, mechanical bulls and failed savings and loans. My house — 2,200 square feet for under $280,000 with schools that are among the state’s highest-rated — is 3.6 miles from a Barneys New York, Versace and plenty of other luxury shops. We’ve got our share of restaurants sporting $50 veal entrees. We’ve got $354 million worth of brand-spanking-new arts venues, a killer sculpture center and a football stadium big enough to create its own weather. Plus we’ve got the world’s third-busiest airport with nonstops to 140 cities.

When the Internet economy allows an increasing number of people to live anywhere, low costs win. Texans spend 8.4% of income on state and local taxes compared with 11.7% for New Yorkers. Dollars that would rent a fifth-floor walk-up in New York City instead can buy a small ranch and maybe even acreage in Texas’ suburbs, where prairie begs to be paved for another Applebee’s.

Texas creates jobs like a fiend, in part because businesses large and small have no worry of obstacles such as plaintiff-friendly courts, consumer-friendly regulators or oversight-friendly lawmakers. Pro-business isn’t just a mantra; they put it in the water.

Oil and gas still play a huge role here, but are increasingly overshadowed by technology, medical and defense jobs. Texas has more Fortune 500 company headquarters than New York.

Not that it’s all barbecue brisket and bodacious blondes in Dallas. The state still has its issues. When you have no income tax, property and sales taxes have to make up the revenue gap, and they’re pretty steep. And try not to be poor down here because the Texas approach to a social safety net can be summed up as “Meh.” Texas spends less per capita on social services than virtually any state.

The income gap here makes Texas look more like Mexico in some ways than the rest of the country, though New York is no stranger to wealth excess contrasted with subsistence living. Texas has led the country in the percentage of people lacking health care, teenage pregnancy rates and drags the bottom on educational attainment. Political discourse here remains whether Democrats are socialists or simply traitors.

But the interesting bit about the census power grab by Texas is that the newcomers are more diverse in every way than the natives. The state’s getting younger, more secular and less white. Dallas is shedding its urban cowboy patina for a modern aesthetic. Tax flight isn’t only changing New York; it’s changing Texas.

Look, the dream of a New York life is very much alive and romanticized. My household kicks around the idea of working and living up there all the time, but the discussion stops after the calculator comes out.

The idea of taking home less pay but living in an area with outrageous costs trumps the chance to be near Broadway or eat a real bagel or stroll Central Park. We still love to do that, but we’ll do it as tourists and not taxpayers.

As New York mulls its budget gap — hey, Texas is short $20 billion for its next budget, too — the idea of higher income taxes just makes the math problem worse for potential citizens. That’d be less of a concern if all the trinkets of New York living weren’t becoming easily exportable.

Eric Torbenson is a writer in Dallas.


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