Immobile Americans

According to Tiebout, people determine where to live based on varying revenue expenditure patterns in different polities, and if someone does not like their local community’s revenue expenditure pattern they will simply move to a different area.  Based on this theory it would seem that people would often be moving, especially from the state they were born in, as they had no choice where they were born or what the revenue expenditure pattern is like in their native community.  However, as this article in The Buffalo News shows, Americans are rarely moving from the state that they were born in, and if they do move it is not a result of the state’s revenue expenditure pattern.  According to the article, only 1.5% of Americans move from the state they were born in, a figure less than that of their parents, and if they do move it is not “to find a state with lower or no income taxes.”

Instead of moving based on a state’s revenue expenditure pattern, people are moving for other factors such as weather, less expensive housing, and a new job.  The article directly contradicts Tiebout’s assumption that people face no job restrictions, since a job is one of the primary causes of people moving or not moving.  As stated in the article, decreased job turnover in the United States has been a primary reason of the lack of Americans moving, showing that people are heavily restricted by their job location.  The article opposes Tiebout’s theory that a community’s revenue expenditure pattern is the driving force behind people moving; instead it shows that state policy makers altering income taxes in hopes of attracting more people to their state is almost entirely futile, and that if a person is moving it is because of weather or a new job, not as a result of a state’s revenue expenditure pattern.