The business climate in Florida has never been better compared to blue states like California, Illinois, New York and New Jersey.
While Florida has no income tax and low business taxes, the other states are raising taxes on individuals and companies. These higher taxes are one of the main reasons why people and industries are leaving those blue states.
Take San Francisco, for example, where 7.5 percent of the population has left the city and businesses are closing. San Francisco residents are moving to red states like Texas, Utah and Florida or more economically competitive swing states like Nevada,
North Carolina, Georgia and Florida are drawing people from blue states like Illinois, New York and New Jersey. These three Sun Belt states have low taxes and fewer regulations. During the pandemic, the red states were open for business while blue states spent excessively and their budgets swelled. Now, they face the reckoning. There is no more federal COVID money and blue states have not cut spending. In blue states, citizens who paid the most in taxes are leaving. In California, the state is dependent on the highest-earning .5 percent of the taxpayers to pay 40 percent of the state revenue. The Golden State’s proposed budget is $32 billion in the red. In Florida, for the first 10 months of this fiscal year, revenue from corporate taxes is up 57 percent. In fact, Florida has 2.5 million more people than New York–and Florida’s state budget is half of the Empire State’s.
Still, the Florida Legislature and Gov. Ron DeSantis need to be careful about ballooning state coffers. Why are they not returning some of that money to the taxpayers? The reserve funds for many years were around $5 billion. Now the reserve is close to $15 billion and that number is only rising.
They need to return more money back to the citizens of Florida. Why are they holding our money?
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