Alex Brill, "How Money Walks: State Income Taxes and Interstate Mobility"

Alex Brill is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he studies the impact of tax policy on the U.S. economy as well as the fiscal, economic, and political consequences of tax, budget, health care, retirement security, and trade policies. He also works on health care reform, pharmaceutical spending and drug innovation, and unemployment insurance reform. Brill is the author of a pro-growth proposal to reduce the corporate tax rate to twenty-five percent, as well as The Real Tax Burden: More Than Dollars and Cents (2011), coauthored with Alan D. Viard. He has testified numerous times before Congress on tax policy, labor markets and unemployment insurance, Social Security reform, fiscal stimulus, the manufacturing sector, and biologic drug competition.

How Money Walks maps the great migration of American income and raises important questions about American tax policy and how it profoundly affects growth and development in our country:
-Why did so much wealth walk? Did people vote with their feet?
-Did money walk because the opportunity to keep more personal income talked?
-How does taxing personal income affect economic growth?
-Which states "won," which states "lost," and why?
These questions are explored in How Money Walks through unimpeachable IRS data mapped by state and metropolitan area. And the answers suggest a simple correlation: the key to accumulating working wealth for any state is a pro-growth tax policy, and that means not taxing personal income.

This talk was recorded on April 22, 2014, and was sponsored by the Federalist Society.