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Opportunity Lives: HOW MONEY WALKS (AND WHY TAX POLICY IS IMPORTANT)
When states raise taxes, people move away. It’s a simple truth, but only recently have we been able to quantify this effect and see “how money walks,” thanks to a new book from Travis H. Brown.
Brown told Opportunity Lives that the idea for the How Money Walks book came from an interest in IRS data files by Rex and Dr. Jeanne Sinquefield, who are very involved in public life and policy advocacy. “Initially, we wanted to calculate how many taxpayers were leaving our home state of Missouri,” said Brown.
The project expanded quickly, and after downloading 100 million taxpayer records for 19 years, Brown and the entire How Money Walks team have learned shocking statistics about people’s responses to tax increases in all 50 states.
Today, you can go to the How Money Walks website and look at the data for your state. “No matter whether you love what the data explains, or detest the information about your state, we believe that it is important that the American people have this knowledge available from their Internal Revenue Service,” said Brown.
What makes the How Money Walks data so interesting is that it is not a survey, so people can’t lie about their preferences. The data is from actual IRS filings.
Read the Full Story on OpportunityLives.com
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