US Militarism Marches On

Republicans and Democrats like to claim that they are on opposite sides of important issues.  Of course, depending on which way the wind blows, they sometimes change sides, like over support for free trade and federal deficits.  Tragically, however, there is no division when it comes to militarism.

For example, the federal budget for fiscal year 2018 (which ends on September 30, 2018), included more money for the military than even President Trump requested.  Trump had asked for a military budget of $603 billion, a sizeable $25 billion increase over fiscal year 2017 levels; Congress approved $629 billion.  Trump had also asked for $65 billion to finance current war fighting, a bump of $5 billion; Congress approved $71 billion.  The National Defense Authorization Act of 2018, which set the target budget for the Department of Defense at this high level, was approved by the Senate in a September 2017 vote of 89-9.

In the words of the New York Times: “In a rare act of bipartisanship on Capitol Hill, the Senate passed a $700 billion defense policy bill . . . that sets forth a muscular vision of America as a global power, with a Pentagon budget that far exceeds what President Trump has asked for.”

That Act also called for a further increase in military spending of $16 billion for fiscal year 2019 (which begins October 1, 2018).  And, in June 2018, the Senate voted 85 to 10 to authorize that increase, boosting the Defense Department’s fiscal year 2019 total to $716 billion.

This bipartisan embrace of militarism comes at enormous cost for working people.  This cost includes cuts in funding for public housing, health care and education; the rebuilding of our infrastructure; basic research and development; and efforts to mitigate climate change.  It also includes the militarization of our police, since the military happily transfers its excess or outdated equipment to willing local police departments.

And it also includes a belligerent foreign policy.  A case in point: Congress has made clear its opposition to the Trump administration decision to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and halt war games directed against North Korea, apparently preferring the possibility of a new Korean War.  Congress is also trying to pass a law that will restrict the ability of the President to reduce the number of US troops stationed in South Korea.

In brief, the US military industrial complex, including the bipartisan consensus which helps to promote militarism’s popular legitimacy, is one of the most important and powerful foes we must overcome if we are to seriously tackle our ever-growing social, economic, and ecological problems.

The military is everywhere

The US has approximately 800 formal military bases in 80 countries, with 135,000 soldiers stationed around the globe.  Putting this in perspective, Alice Slater reports that:

only 11 other countries have bases in foreign countries, some 70 altogether. Russia has an estimated 26 to 40 in nine countries, mostly former Soviet Republics, as well as in Syria and Vietnam; the UK, France, and Turkey have four to 10 bases each; and an estimated one to three foreign bases are occupied by India, China, Japan, South Korea, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands.

US special forces are deployed in even more countries.  According to Nick Turse, as of 2015, these forces were operating in 135 countries, an 80 percent increase over the previous five years.  “That’s roughly 70 percent of the countries on the planet. Every day, in fact, America’s most elite troops are carrying out missions in 80 to 90 nations practicing night raids or sometimes conducting them for real, engaging in sniper training or sometimes actually gunning down enemies from afar.”

This widespread geographic deployment represents not only an aggressive projection of US elite interests, it also provides a convenient rationale for those that want to keep the money flowing.  The military, and those that support its funding, always complain that the military needs more funds to carry out its mission.  Of course, the additional funds enable the military to expand the reach of its operations, thereby justifying another demand for yet more money.

The US military is well funded 

It is no simple matter to estimate of how much we spend on military related activities.  The base military budget is the starting point.  It represents the amount of the discretionary federal budget that is allocated to the Department of Defense.  Then there is the overseas contingency operations fund, which is a separate pool of money sitting outside any budgetary restrictions, that the military receives yearly from the Congress to cover the costs of its ongoing warfare.

It is the combination of the two that most analysts cite when talking about the size of the military budget. Using this combined measure, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute finds that the United States spends more on its military than the next seven largest military spenders combined, which are China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, France, the UK, and Japan.

As the following chart shows, US military spending (base budget plus overseas contingency operations fund), adjusted for inflation, has been on the rise for some time, and is now higher than at any time other than during the height of the Iraq war.  Jeff Stein, writing in the Washington Post, reports that the military’s base budget will likely be “the biggest in recent American history since at least the 1970s, adjusting for inflation.”

As big as it is, the above measure of military spending grossly understates the total.  As JP Sottile explains:

The Project on Government Oversight (POGO) tabulated all “defense-related spending” for both 2017 and 2018, and it hit nearly $1.1 trillion for each of the two years. The “defense-related” part is important because the annual National Defense Authorization Act, a.k.a. the defense budget, doesn’t fully account for all the various forms of national security spending that gets peppered around a half-dozen agencies.

William Hartung, an expert on military spending, went agency by agency to expose all the various military-related expenses that are hidden in different parts of the budget.  As he points out:

You might think that the most powerful weapons in the U.S. arsenal — nuclear warheads — would be paid for out of the Pentagon budget.   And you would, of course, be wrong.  The cost of researching, developing, maintaining, and “modernizing” the American arsenal of 6,800 nuclear warheads falls to an obscure agency located inside the Department of Energy, the National Nuclear Security Administration, or NNSA. It also works on naval nuclear reactors, pays for the environmental cleanup of nuclear weapons facilities, and funds the nation’s three nuclear weapons laboratories, at a total annual cost of more than $20 billion per year.

Hartung’s grand total, which includes, among other things, the costs of Homeland Security, foreign military aid, intelligence services, the Veterans Administration, and the interest on the debt generated by past spending on the military, is $1.09 trillion, roughly the same as the POGO total cited above.  In short, our political leaders are far from forthcoming about the true size of our military spending.

Adding insult to injury, the military cannot account for how it spends a significant share of the funds it is given.  A Reuters’ article by Scott Paltrow tells the story:

The United States Army’s finances are so jumbled it had to make trillions of dollars of improper accounting adjustments to create an illusion that its books are balanced.

The Defense Department’s Inspector General, in a June [2016] report, said the Army made $2.8 trillion in wrongful adjustments to accounting entries in one quarter alone in 2015, and $6.5 trillion for the year. Yet the Army lacked receipts and invoices to support those numbers or simply made them up.

As a result, the Army’s financial statements for 2015 were “materially misstated,” the report concluded. The “forced” adjustments rendered the statements useless because “DoD and Army managers could not rely on the data in their accounting systems when making management and resource decisions.” . . .

The report affirms a 2013 Reuters series revealing how the Defense Department falsified accounting on a large scale as it scrambled to close its books. As a result, there has been no way to know how the Defense Department – far and away the biggest chunk of Congress’ annual budget – spends the public’s money.

The new report focused on the Army’s General Fund, the bigger of its two main accounts, with assets of $282.6 billion in 2015. The Army lost or didn’t keep required data, and much of the data it had was inaccurate, the IG said.

“Where is the money going? Nobody knows,” said Franklin Spinney, a retired military analyst for the Pentagon and critic of Defense Department planning. . . .

For years, the Inspector General – the Defense Department’s official auditor – has inserted a disclaimer on all military annual reports. The accounting is so unreliable that “the basic financial statements may have undetected misstatements that are both material and pervasive.”

Military spending is big for business

Almost half of the US military budget goes to private military contractors.  These military contracts are the lifeblood for many of the largest corporations in America.  Lockheed Martin and Boeing rank one and two on the list of companies that get the most money from the government.  In 2017 Lockheed Martin reported $51 billion in sales, with $35.2 billion coming from the government.  Boeing got $26.5 billion. The next three in line are Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman.  These top five firms captured some $100 billion in Pentagon contracts in 2016.

And, as Hartung describes,

The Pentagon buys more than just weapons. Health care companies like Humana ($3.6 billion), United Health Group ($2.9 billion), and Health Net ($2.6 billion) cash in as well, and they’re joined by, among others, pharmaceutical companies like McKesson ($2.7 billion) and universities deeply involved in military-industrial complex research like MIT ($1 billion) and Johns Hopkins ($902 million).

Not surprisingly, given how lucrative these contracts are, private contractors work hard to ensure the generosity of Congress. In 2017, for example, 208 defense companies spent almost $100 million to deploy 728 reported lobbyists.  Lobbying is made far easier by the fact that more than 80 percent of top Pentagon officials have worked for the defense industry at some point in their careers, and many will go back to work in the defense industry.

Then there are arms sales to foreign governments. Lawrence Wittner cites a study by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute that found that sales of weapons and military services by the world’s largest 100 corporate military suppliers totaled $375 billion in 2016. “U.S. corporations increased their share of that total to almost 58 percent, supplying weapons to at least 100 nations around the world.”

Eager to promote the arms industry, government officials work hard on their behalf.  As Hartung explains: From the president on his trips abroad to visit allied world leaders to the secretaries of state and defense to the staffs of U.S. embassies, American officials regularly act as salespeople for the arms firms.”

More for the military and less for everything else

The federal budget is divided into three categories: mandatory spending (primarily social security and medicare), discretionary spending, and interest on the debt. Two trends in discretionary spending, the component of the budget set each year at the discretion of Congress, offer a window on how militarism is squeezing out funding for programs that serve majority needs.

The first noteworthy trend is the growing Congressional support for defense (base military budget) over non-defense programs. In 2001, the majority of discretionary funds went to non-defense programs,  However, that soon changed, as we see in the chart below, thanks to the “war on terror.”  In the decade following September 11, 2001, military spending increased by 50 percent, while spending on every other government program increased by only 13.5 percent.

In the 2018 federal budget, 54 percent of discretionary funds are allocated to the military (narrowly defined), $700 billion to the military and $591 billion to non-military programs. The chart below shows President Trump’s discretionary budgetary request for fiscal year 2019. As we can see, the share of funds for the military would rise to 61 percent of the total.

According to the National Priorities Project, “President Trump’s proposals for future spending, if accepted by Congress, would ensure that, by 2023, the proportion of military spending [in the discretionary budget] would soar to 65 percent.”  Of course, militarism’s actual share is much greater, since the military is being defined quite narrowly.  For example, Veterans’ Benefits is included in the non-defense category.

The second revealing trend is the decline in non-defense discretionary spending relative to GDP.  Thus, not only is the military base budget growing more rapidly than the budget for nondefense programs, spending on discretionary non-defense programs is not even keeping up with the growth in the economy.  This trend translates into a declining public capacity to support research and development and infrastructure modernization, as well as meet growing needs for housing, education, health and safety, disaster response . . . the list is long.

The 2018 bipartisan budget deal increased discretionary spending for both defense and non-defense programs, but the deal did little to reverse this long run decline in non-defense discretionary spending relative to the size of the economy.  A Progressive Policy Institute blog post by Ben Ritz explains:

The Budget Control Act of 2011 (BCA) capped both categories of discretionary spending as part of a broader effort to reduce future deficits. When Congress failed to reach a bipartisan agreement on taxes and other categories of federal spending, the BCA automatically triggered an even deeper, across-the-board cut to discretionary spending known as sequestration. While the sequester has been lifted several times since it first took effect, discretionary spending consistently remained far below the original BCA caps.

That trend ended with the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018 (BBA). This budget deal not only lifted discretionary spending above sequester levels – it also went above and beyond the original BCA caps for two years. Nevertheless, projected domestic discretionary spending for Fiscal Year 2019 is significantly below the historical average as a percentage of gross domestic product. Moreover, even if policymakers extended these policy changes beyond the two years covered by the BBA, we project that domestic discretionary spending could fall to just 3 percent of GDP within the next decade – the lowest level in modern history [see dashed black line in chart below].

The story is similar for defense spending. Thanks to the pressure put on by the sequester, defense discretionary spending fell to just under 3.1 percent of GDP in FY2017. Under the BBA, defense spending would increase to 3.4 percent of GDP in FY2019 before falling again [see dashed black line in following chart]. Unlike domestic discretionary spending, however, defense would remain above the all-time low it reached before the 2001 terrorist attacks throughout the next decade.

In sum, Congress appears determined to squeeze non-defense programs, increasingly privileging defense over non-defense spending in the discretionary budget and allowing non-defense spending as a share of GDP to fall to record lows.  The ratio of discretionary defense spending relative to GDP appears to be stabilizing, although at levels below its long-term average.  However, discretionary defense spending refers only to the base budget of the Department of Defense and as such is a seriously understated measure of the costs of US militarism.  Including the growing costs of Homeland Security, foreign military aid, intelligence services, the Veterans Administration, the interest on the debt generated by past spending on the military, and the overseas contingency operations fund, would result in a far different picture, one that would leave no doubt about the government’s bipartisan commitment to militarism.

The challenge ahead

Fighting militarism is not easy.  Powerful political and business forces have made great strides in converting the United States into a society that celebrates violence, guns, and the military. The chart below highlights one measure of this success.  Sadly, 39 percent of Americans polled support increasing our national defense while 46 percent think it is just about right. Only 13 percent think it is stronger than it needs to be.

Polls, of course, just reveal individual responses at a moment in time to questions that, in isolation, often provide respondents with no meaningful context or alternatives and thus reveal little about people’s true thoughts.  At the same time, results like this show just how important it is for us to work to create space for community conversations that are informed by accurate information on the extent and aims of US militarism and its enormous political, social, economic, and ecological costs for the great majority of working people.

US Manufacturing Is Far From Healthy And The Main Reason Appears To Be Globalization

Public awareness and acceptance of the negative consequences of corporate-driven globalization on US workers has grown dramatically over the last years, aided in part by Donald Trump’s attacks on trade agreements like NAFTA.  Of course, Trump deliberately and misleadingly claims that US corporations have also suffered.  And, his tariff-raising actions are an ineffective response to worker difficulties.

Still, many economists continue to argue that the concern over trade is misplaced, that the US manufacturing sector is generally healthy, and it is technology, in particular automation, that is the main reason for the decline in US manufacturing employment.

A new paper by the economist Susan Houseman, “Understanding the Decline of US Manufacturing Employment,” is an effective rebuttal to their arguments. As she concludes: “The widespread denial of domestic manufacturing’s weakness and globalization’s role in its employment collapse has inhibited much-needed, informed debate over trade policies.”

What’s up with the manufacturing sector?  

Figure 1 shows that manufacturing employment remained roughly stable from the mid-1960s through the early 1980s, then began a slow decline until 2000, after which it fell dramatically.

Figure 2 compares the performance of the manufacturing sector–production and employment–with that of the private sector as a whole.  As we can see, the real GDP growth of the manufacturing sector has roughly matched the real GDP growth of the private sector (red and yellow lines; left scale).

Figure 2 also shows that manufacturing’s share of private sector GDP and employment has steadily fallen (green and blue-gray lines; right scale). Manufacturing’s share of private sector GDP peaked at 33 percent in 1953, falling to 13 percent in 2016.  Manufacturing’s share of private sector employment peaked at 35 percent, also in 1953, and fell to just under 10 percent in 2016.

Those who argue that our manufacturing sector remains healthy do so on the basis of the sector’s relatively strong growth record and the fact that it was achieved with ever fewer workers.  As Houseman comments:

many [research economists] have taken it as strong prima facie evidence that higher productivity growth in manufacturing—implicitly or explicitly assumed to reflect automation—has largely caused the relative and absolute declines of manufacturing employment. Even when some role for trade is recognized, it is deemed small, and the decline is taken as inevitable.

However, there is a bit of a puzzle here.  Figure 2 shows that manufacturing GDP growth has generally matched the GDP growth of the entire private sector at the same time that manufacturing’s share of private GDP has steadily fallen.  Houseman offers the solution to this puzzle: “If real GDP growth for manufacturing has kept pace with real GDP growth in the aggregate economy yet manufacturing’s share of private sector GDP is falling, then it must be the case that the average price growth of manufactured goods has been slower than the average price growth for the goods and services produced in the economy.”

In other words, a relatively slow growth in the price of manufactured goods would boost the real value of the goods produced.  At the same time, it would also cause a decline in the manufacturing sector’s share of total output.  And, an examination of price deflators shows just such price trends, with the overall price deflator for the private sector steadily rising and the price deflator for manufacturing remaining relatively constant in the post 1980 period.  Thus, the strong growth in manufacturing GDP and its related productivity/automation story rests heavily on the striking behavior of the manufacturing price deflator.

And therein lies the problem.  Houseman finds that the strong growth in real manufacturing GDP is driven by the price behavior of goods produced by a small subset of manufacturing, namely the computer industry (which she broadens to include semiconductors).  “Although the computer industry has accounted for less than 15 percent of value-added in manufacturing throughout the period, it has an outsized effect on measured real output and productivity growth in the sector, skewing these statistics and giving a misleading impression of the health of American manufacturing.”

Digging into the data 

Figure 4 shows price indices for private industry and manufacturing, omitting the computer industry, and for the computer industry alone. Without the computer industry, the price indices for private industry and manufacturing have largely tracked each other.  The computer industry price index, on the other hand, has marched to the beat of a far different drummer.

Figure 5 illustrates the importance of the above deflators to the debate about the health of the manufacturing sector.  Starting in the mid-1980s we see an ever-greater gap between the real GDP growth of manufacturing without the computer industry (blue-gray line) and the growth of real GDP in the private sector and manufacturing (including the computer industry).

More specifically, “From 1979 to 2000, measured real GDP growth in manufacturing was 97 percent of the average for the private sector; when the computer industry is dropped from both series, manufacturing’s real GDP growth rate is just 45 percent that of the private sector average.” Growth in the manufacturing sector, with the computer industry omitted, has been exceptionally slow over the years 2000 to 2016. Over that period, “real GDP growth in manufacturing was 63 percent of the average private sector growth. Omitting the computer industry from each series, manufacturing’s measured real output growth is near zero (about 0.2 percent per year) and just 12 percent of the average for the private sector in the 2000s.”

So, without the computer industry, manufacturing is clearly struggling.  But what explains the strong computer industry performance?  As we see next, there is also reason to believe that the computer industry’s performance, and thus its contribution to the manufacturing sector, is also seriously overstated, thereby further undermining claims of manufacturing’s health.

The computer industry

The real GDP of an industry is calculated by dividing the yearly dollar value of industry sales by its price deflator.  A real increase in output thus requires that industry sales grow faster than industry prices; if sales double and prices double there is no real gain.

Product quality changes slowly in most industries allowing rather straightforward year to year comparisons of dollar output.  However, the computer industry stands as an outlier; for years now, it has produced significantly more powerful products each year.  And, on top of that, it has even lowered their prices.

As a result of this unusual behavior, estimating the real growth of the computer industry requires a complicated adjustment of the industry’s price index to account for the yearly increase in computer power and speed.  In broad brush the adjustment is handled as follows: If a consumer buys a computer that has 20 percent more computing power than the previous year’s model, the government considers that every 100 new computers produced are the equivalent of 120 of the previous year’s model.  The result of such an adjustment is a significant increase in the industry’s output even if the same number of actual computers are produced, an increase that is further magnified by the decline in industry prices.

While it is entirely reasonable to adjust the computer industry’s output for quality when studying the performance of that industry, we have to be careful when the results are used in the calculation of manufacturing’s overall performance. In fact, the computer industry’s rapid gains, based on significant increases in output with declining employment, are misleading as a measure of actual manufacturing activity for two reasons: first, they owe more to difficult-to-measure quality improvements driven by research and development, and second, a growing share of computer industry production has been globalized which means that it takes place outside the country.

As Houseman says, “quality adjustment [for the computer industry] can make the numbers difficult to interpret. Because the computer industry, though small in dollar terms, skews the aggregate manufacturing statistics and has led to much confusion, figures that exclude this industry, as shown in Figure 5, provide a clearer picture of trends in manufacturing output.”  And as we can see those trends do not support the claims made that we have a healthy manufacturing sector.

The decline in manufacturing employment

Houseman similarly shows that productivity’s role in the decline in manufacturing employment has also been seriously overstated. As Figure 1, above, makes clear, the number of manufacturing workers has been falling for some time.

From 1979 to 1989 manufacturing lost 1.4 million jobs, with the losses concentrated in the primary metals and textile and apparel industries. “Employment in manufacturing was relatively stable in the 1990s. Although measured employment declined by about 700,000, or 4 percent, from 1989 to 2000, the net decline in jobs can be entirely explained by the [domestic] outsourcing of tasks previously done in-house. . . . Had these workers been counted in manufacturing, manufacturing employment would have risen by an estimated 1.3 percent rather than declining.”

As Figure 1 also shows, the explosive decline in manufacturing employment begins in the 2000s.  From 2000 to 2007, manufacturing employment fell by 3.4 million, or 20 percent. From 2007 to 2016, manufacturing fell by another 1.5 million.  And, of course, this was a period of intensified globalization, perhaps best marked by China’s 2001 entry into the WTO.

Examining the data, Houseman found that average annual employment growth in manufacturing was approximately 2.5 percent lower than the average employment growth in the private sector as a whole over the period 1977 to 2016.  Only 15 percent of that differential is accounted for by lower output growth in manufacturing, the rest is explained by higher productivity growth.  However, “When the computer industry is omitted from both series, 61 percent of the lower manufacturing employment growth is accounted for by manufacturing’s lower output growth, and just 39 percent by its higher labor productivity growth.”

As Housemen comments, “The point of this exercise is to show that there is no prima facie evidence that productivity growth is entirely or primarily responsible for the relative and absolute decline in manufacturing employment.”

And there is also reason to question the meaning of the strong computer industry productivity figures. Labor productivity is defined as the value-added of an industry divided by labor input.  In the case of the computer industry, the industry’s productivity growth was probably driven most by product improvements, not automation, that boosted its value added. However, global outsourcing of production also made a contribution. While outsourcing reduces the value added of the industry, the decline in labor input is far greater. Thus, it remains unclear how much productivity increases based on the automation of production have actually contributed to the decline in US manufacturing employment, even in the computer industry.

Most importantly, there is a growing body of research that points to globalization as the major factor behind the recent decline in US manufacturing employment.  For example, Economists David Autor, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson “conservatively estimate that Chinese import competition explains 16 percent of the U.S. manufacturing employment decline between 1990 and 2000, 26 percent of the decline between 2000 and 2007, and 21 percent of the decline over the full period.”  They also find that Chinese import competition “significantly reduces earnings in sectors outside manufacturing.”

In sum, there are good reasons for concern about the health of the US manufacturing sector and opposition to corporate-driven globalization strategies.

Ignore Their Threats, Tax The Rich

In most states in the United States, the rich have enjoyed ever lower rates of taxation while working people have suffered from inadequately funded public services.  Calls for an end to this situation are more often than not met with statements by state officials and the wealthy themselves that higher taxes on the rich will prove counterproductive; the rich will just move to lower-tax states.  In fact, research by the sociologist Christobal Young shows that this is largely an empty threat.  The rich rarely move to escape high taxes.

The threat

Oregon offers one example of this threat.  In 2009, the Oregon Legislature passed two measures (66 and 67) in an effort to boost funding for education, health and public safety.  Measure 66 would raise taxes on high income Oregonians—couples earning over $250,000 a year and individuals earning over $125,000 a year.  Measure 67 would raise taxes on profitable corporations.

Opponents of the measures succeeded in placing them on the ballot, hoping that they could scare voters into rejecting them.  Almost all major business leaders threatened calamity if they passed.  For example, Phil Knight, the CEO of Nike, not only gave $100,000 to the anti-measures campaign, he also wrote an article published in the Oregonian newspaper in which he said:

Measures 66 and 67 should be labeled Oregon’s Assisted Suicide Law II.

They will allow us to watch a state slowly killing itself.

They are anti-business, anti-success, anti-inspirational, anti-humanitarian, and most ironically, in the long run, they will deprive the state of tax revenue, not increase it. . . .

Reputable economists forecast 66 and 67 will cost the state thousands — maybe tens of thousands — of jobs, and that thousands of our most successful residents will leave the state.

Knight ended his letter with his own threat to leave the state if the measures passed.  However, voters approved both measures, and Nike and Phil Knight remain in Oregon.

Young provides other examples of threats of “rich flight”:

As California considered similar taxes [to Oregon], policymakers cautioned “nothing is more mobile than a millionaire and his money”. In New Jersey, governor Chris Christie simply stated: “Ladies and Gentlemen, if you tax them, they will leave.”

The reality

Young studied tax return data, which shows where people live, for every million-dollar earner in the United States over the years 1999 to 2011.  His data set included “3.7 million top-earning individuals, who collectively filed more than 45 million tax returns.”

What he found was that the migration rate of millionaires was relatively low, with only 2.4 percent of millionaires changing their state residence in a given year.  Perhaps not surprisingly, as we see below, poorer people tend to move from one state to another more often than do millionaires.

Young does note that “When millionaires do move, they admittedly tend to favor lower-tax states over higher-tax ones – but only marginally so. Around 15 percent of interstate millionaire migrations bring a net tax advantage. The other 85 percent have no net tax impact for the movers.”

Moreover, almost all the movement by millionaires to lower-tax states is accounted for by moves to just one state, Florida.  Other low-tax states, like Texas, were not net-recipients of millionaires fleeing high-tax states.  In short there is no real evidence that millionaires systematically move from high-tax states to low-tax states.

Young believes that one major reason for the lack of migration by the rich is that “migration is a young person’s game.”  As the figure below shows, people tend to move for education and early in their careers. Thus:

By the time people hit their early forties, PhDs, college grads and high school drop-outs all show the same low rate of migration. Typically, millionaires are society’s highly educated at an advanced career stage. They are typically the late-career working rich: established professionals in management, finance, consulting, medicine, law and similar fields. And they have low migration because they are both socially and economically embedded in place.

The global story

Young finds the global story is much the same.  He examined the 2010 Forbes list of world’s billionaires and found that approximately 85 percent still lived in their country of birth.  Moreover, as he explains:

among those who do live abroad, most moved to their current country of residence long before they became wealthy – either as children with their parents, or as students going abroad to study (and then staying). . . . Only about 5% of world billionaires moved abroad after they became successful.

The take-away

The rich have both increased their share of income and reduced their share of state taxes over the last decades.  This has left most states unable to provide the critical public services working people need.  Young’s study demonstrates that we should not allow fears of “rich flight” to keep us from building “tax the rich movements” across the United States.