California, New York, and to some degree, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania all have state exit taxes. When you’ve had it up to here, they make sure to get another piece of you before you try to take your economic toys and find a new home. These apply to high-value sales and high earners, and serve as a fiscal disincentive to take your wealth elsewhere.
Suppose you are taking your money and leaving the country for good. In that case, the federal government, as well as the states of California, Connecticut, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont, want an extra piece of you.
Most of us will never experience them, though a departure after a home sale in some states could result in an extra tax as a parting gift. Taxation is theft, but this is just another insult. They’ve made you feel unwelcome, abused your success, but before you leave, how about a few last punches to the face before you go? Even if you have to move for other reasons, some states want to take some more before you go.
Nations in the European Union, which have taxes on their taxes, are embracing this approach to prevent people from trying to escape the hell they’ve created. In Europe, that hell is open borders immigration and growing intolerance from “leadership” to complaints about the destruction of entire cultures to appease multiculturalism that favors every culture but that of the nation itself.
As with all progressive policies, and this applies everywhere, the people who can escape do, leaving the middle and lower classes to carry the increased burden of that hell. Albeit, one they repeatedly re-elected until, as in Germany, the state made the more sensible alternatives illegal. AfD would turn the tide and push policies that could rescue Germany, but progressive elites fearmonger any alternative, so Germans with the ability are leaving for good.
More and more people are turning their backs on the European Union. With them, the states are also losing economic substance. Exit taxes are being used in an attempt to counter this.
The states of the European Union are experiencing a veritable exodus. About 1.4 million EU citizens left their home countries in 2023, among them 265,000 Germans. Among the favored destinations are, alongside Switzerland and the United States, booming regions such as Qatar or Dubai.
This is reminiscent of the story about U-Haul running out of trucks because no one is moving into the state as swarms flee its destructive left-Wing majorities.
EU citizens are not infrequently being drained by a tax burden of 45 percent. We know this from Germany: it is not even necessary to count among the absolute top earners in order to have to surrender nearly half of one’s income to the tax authorities. Basically, it is a scandal—one about which there is no longer any open discussion.
In Dubai, for example, there is no income tax at all. In the United States, the state burdens its citizens with around 27 percent. Anyone who can calculate, who is well educated and mobile, draws the consequences. Alongside the tax burden, social crises increasingly come into play: uncontrolled migration, the decay of major cities, and the visibly hostile climate of ever-expanding bureaucracies. For many ambitious people, life in the EU’s Europe is simply too expensive, and the essence of bureaucracy too overbearing.
Progressives and progressivism have many failures, not the least of which is that they do not learn from their mistakes, because to them, these are not mistakes. But what is really telling is that if they could, they would extend these fiscal Berlin Walls and build real ones, which is ironic, especially in Germany. It is a nation that escaped National Socialism and Marxist Socialism, only to embrace the multi-culti variety whose failures may begin on different slippery slopes but end with a very similar form of despotism.
One that, if they wait long enough, will make Germany unrecognizable as anything but another intolerant Muslim state operating on a form of religious fascism, right along with much of the rest of Europe. An end, Mr. Trump, and many have warned them about, but it is a sound elite European ears refuse to hear.
