Last week I took Jerry Brown to task for repeating the right-wing canard that tax increases will cause jobs and the wealthy to flee the state. Here’s what he told the Chronicle’s Carla Marinucci:

Still, “I would not be advocating new taxes, I’ll tell you that,” he said. Already, California is “one of the highest tax states around,” he said. “So we’ve got to be competitive. We can’t drive all the jobs out and tax the few people who stay.”

A similar debate has been playing out in New York State, where progressives have been arguing for higher income taxes on the wealthy to close that state’s budget gap. Governor David Paterson and Mayor Michael Bloomberg – himself one of New York’s wealthiest individuals – have argued as Jerry Brown has, spouting the conventional wisdom that taxing the wealthy will simply cause them to go Galt and leave the state to avoid the tax.

But as the New York Times reports today, there’s no evidence for that myth:

Yet there is surprisingly little evidence to support the proposition that rich New Yorkers would bolt if forced to pay higher income taxes. Though tracking the movement of wealthy taxpayers from state to state is difficult, experts on public finance and migration say they have yet to document a substantial “rich drain” in states that have raised income taxes in recent years.

“At the level we’re talking about, there’s no quantitative evidence that it affects the mobility decisions of affluent taxpayers,” said Douglas S. Massey, a demographer at Princeton University and president of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.

The NYT points to California, where Prop 63 levied a 1% income tax surcharge on millionaires to pay for mental health programs (which Prop 1E on the May 19 ballot would gut). Jean Ross of the California Budget Project is quoted to explain how that tax did not cause Beverly Hills to become a ghost town:

While those departures cost the state about $38 million a year in revenue, the study estimates, the higher taxes levied on those who stayed have brought in an average of $895 million a year. Also in 2004, California voters approved a 1 percent income tax surcharge on personal income over $1 million, and Silicon Valley and Beverly Hills appear to remain well populated with the wealthy. From 2004 to 2007, according to a study by the California Budget Project, a left-leaning research organization, the number of millionaire taxpayers rose by close to 50 percent, well outpacing the 8.6 percent growth in the total number of those paying personal income tax.

The article also cites New Jersey, where Governor Jon Corzine also instituted a wealth tax several years ago that did not cause the wealthy to flee – even though it’s easier to move to a different state back east and still keep much of your life and work rooted in the same spot.

Here in California, however, it’s virtually impossible to become a tax refugee without uprooting yourself from the state entirely. Sure, Nevada has no income tax, but neither Reno nor Las Vegas are exactly close in proximity to SF and LA. It’s not like moving to Connecticut while you keep the rest of your life in Manhattan.

Of course, the CBP has also demonstrated that tax increases are preferable to spending cuts in a recession.

The wingnut anti-tax rhetoric is not based in reality – so why are Democratic gubernatorial candidates repeating it so frequently? Let’s hope Jerry Brown sees this NYT article, and stops repeating myths that have already been busted.