What Happened to All My Millionaires?
First Maryland, now Nueva Jork.
As noted in today’s Wall Street Journal, states are lining up to increase revenue by sticking it to the rich. However, the states ignore ample evidence that capital (and the owners thereof) is mobile, and flows to lower tax jurisdictions. It’s as predictable as water flowing down hill.
Examples:
Nueva Jork: Paychex founder, Sabres owner and billionaire Tom Golisano relocated to Florida to avoid the “soak the rich” tax increase. Rush Limbaugh has refused to work or live at all in New York to avoid the tax increase. Governor Paterson is living in denial, believing Golisano and Limbaugh will return.
Maryland: One third of Maryland’s millionaires have relocated to lower tax adjoining jurisdictions to avoid Maryland’s new confiscatory tax on the wealthy.
The most interesting part of the entire fiasco is that both Maryland and New York jacked up the cigarette tax with the stated purpose of pricing people out of smoking. Tax the heck out of cigarettes, get less smoking, the theory goes.
How could any sane politician think taxing the rich would have a different result?
Always right, unless he isn’t, the infallible Ghettoputer F. X. Gormogons claims to be an in-law of the Volgi, although no one really believes this.
’Puter carefully follows economic and financial trends, legal affairs, and serves as the Gormogons’ financial and legal advisor. He successfully defended us against a lawsuit from a liquor distributor worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid deliveries of bootleg shandies.
The Geep has an IQ so high it is untestable and attempts to measure it have resulted in dangerously unstable results as well as injuries to researchers. Coincidentally, he publishes intelligence tests as a side gig.
His sarcasm is so highly developed it borders on the psychic, and he is often able to insult a person even before meeting them. ’Puter enjoys hunting small game with 000 slugs and punt guns, correcting homilies in real time at Mass, and undermining unions. ’Puter likes to wear a hockey mask and carry an axe into public campgrounds, where he bursts into people’s tents and screams. As you might expect, he has been shot several times but remains completely undeterred.
He assures us that his obsessive fawning over news stories involving women teachers sleeping with young students is not Freudian in any way, although he admits something similar once happened to him. Uniquely, ’Puter is unable to speak, read, or write Russian, but he is able to sing it fluently.
Geep joined the order in the mid-1980s. He arrived at the Castle door with dozens of steamer trunks and an inarticulate hissing creature of astonishingly low intelligence he calls “Sleestak.” Ghettoputer appears to make his wishes known to Sleestak, although no one is sure whether this is the result of complex sign language, expert body posture reading, or simply beating Sleestak with a rubber mallet.
‘Puter suggests the Czar suck it.