Right-to-Work States Win as Trillions Have Fled Union States – Inside Sources

For many years, data from the Internal Revenue Service have shown how California, New York and Illinois are paying a high price for allowing dues-hungry union leaders to get workers fired for refusing to bankroll their organizations.

Year after year, far more taxpayers have been leaving forced-dues states than moving into them. The cumulative net losses in taxpayers and their income have been cutting into these states’ revenue bases.

The latest taxpayer migration data furnished by the IRS showed that the 23 states then lacking Right-to-Work laws — laws that ban forced union fees as a job condition — lost a total of $40 billion in adjusted gross income due to the net outmigration of taxpayers occurring in the single year before they filed their tax returns for 2022.

The fact is, annual IRS migration data tell only a small part of the story because they do not track how much fleeing taxpayers earn in the year after they depart.  Inevitably, the IRS data understate forced-unionism states’ accumulating income losses — and by a lot.

As the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, a Maryland-based nonprofit, explains, “income doesn’t freeze when it crosses a state line.”  For example, the taxpayers “who moved to Florida in 2013” didn’t bring just one year apiece of earnings.  Practically every one of them also brought “a career, a spending pattern, and a tax footprint that continued generating economic activity, year after year.”

To furnish information about each of the 50 states’ estimated cumulative net gains or losses of income and people over multi-year periods, the Committee to Unleash Prosperity launched its Vote With Your Feet Project, a data platform.  In May, the National Institute for Labor Relations Research collected the migration data on this platform to get a far more accurate picture of the cumulative income losses forced-unionism states are enduring due to net domestic outmigration than the IRS can provide.

The Vote With Your Feet Project data showed that the 23 states that lack Right-to-Work protections for employees from 2012 through 2023 lost $2.05 trillion in cumulative adjusted gross income solely as a consequence of domestic outmigration of taxpayers and their dependents during that 11-year period.

Nine states (California, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania) lost between $105 billion and $660 billion apiece in cumulative adjusted gross income.

Overall, the 23 states that had Right-to-Work laws on the books from 2012 to 2023 enjoyed a net gain of $2.46 trillion in cumulative adjusted gross income, thanks to taxpayer in-migration.  The six biggest gainers, in absolute terms (Arizona, Florida, Nevada, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas), are all Right-to-Work states.

As a consequence of the massive net losses of income it experienced from 2012 onward by means of “foot voting,” forced-unionism California’s 2023 aggregate adjusted gross income was slashed by 11.8 percent, according to the Committee to Unleash Prosperity’s estimate. Illinois’ aggregate adjusted gross income was 20.7 percent lower than it would have been.  And net taxpayer outmigration cut New York’s 2023 total adjusted gross income by 21.1 percent.

Obviously, cumulative losses of taxable income of this magnitude make it far more burdensome for the taxpayers who remain to cover the cost of state and local government in Big Labor-dominated jurisdictions.

And this year, union-owned politicians in Sacramento, Springfield and Albany are greenlighting additional costly taxpayer-funded handouts for public-sector unions, practically ensuring their already troubled state finances will face even more severe problems in the future. The remaining taxpayers in these forced-unionism states will have to front the burden until they also choose to leave.