As Lieutenant Governor Ralph Northam and Congressman Tom Perriello continue their race to the left in in their Democrat primary, each of them have released enormous government spending plans that rely on increasing taxes on Virginians.
While Both Northam and Perriello claim that these are taxes strictly for the wealthy, the reality is that they’re tax increases on small businesses, too, as most Virginia small business owners pay at the personal income tax rate.
Connecticut has already tried what Northam and Perriello have proposed and the results have been tragic, as the Wall Street Journal has found:
According to the fiscal analyst, income-tax collections declined this year for the first time since the recession due to lower earnings at the top. Many wealthy residents decamped for lower-tax states after Mr. Malloy and his Republican predecessor Jodi Rell raised the top individual rate on more than $500,000 of income to 6.99% from 5%.
In the past five years 27,400 Connecticut residents, including Ms. Rell, have moved to no-income-tax Florida, and seven of the state’s eight counties have lost population since 2010. Population flight has depressed economic growth—Connecticut’s real GDP has shrunk by 0.1% since 2010—as well as home values and sales-tax revenues.
The Governor—a slow learner—seems finally to have accepted that raising taxes on the wealthy is a dead fiscal end.
Neither Northam, nor Perriello have offered any evidence to suggest the outcome will be different in Virginia, where we are already seeing our population decline due to a stagnant economy.
If states are the laboratories of Democracy, Virginia would do well to avoid this already-failed experiment.