New York has been losing people to other states for a while. But something new happened during the pandemioc: The people who left had higher incomes than those who stayed behind — much higher.
The 2020-21 numbers here were released in late April by the Internal Revenue Service. They sort taxpayers by whether and where they moved between filing their taxes in 2020 and filing them in 2021; the adjusted gross incomes are for the 2020 tax year. It has been two years since May 17, 2021 — that year’s belated income tax filing deadline — and a lot has changed. But New York has continued to lose population, and if the trend depicted above were to continue, even in less extreme form, it would be disastrous for the finances of a state that relies on income taxes paid by those making $200,000 or more a year for almost half its revenue. (That is, before the pandemic in 2019, personal income taxes accounted for 65% of state revenue, and those making $200,000 or more paid 71% of the income taxes.)
That the loss of affluent taxpayers didn’t lead to disaster during the pandemic mainly had to do with how much the prices of stocks, houses and other assets rose in 2020 and 2021. New York is one of the country’s richest states; many residents own valuable assets or have incomes that rise with asset prices or both. As a result, while the number of taxpayers with incomes of $1 million or more who left the state jumped in 2020 and 2021, the number who stayed grew even more.