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By Root 1145 0

by 14.3 percent from 1970 to 1976. In those same years, non-farm employment soared 40 percent in Arizona, 34 percent in New Mexico, 29 percent in Florida. Texas alone gained almost 1 million jobs—more than the combined growth of Michigan, Illinois, Ohio and Massachusetts. The Houston job market expands by 4 percent annually, easily providing employment opportunities for the 1,000 families who arrive each week. Since 1960, New York City has experienced the slowest growth in non-farm jobs of any major city in America. While older cities worry about too little growth, newer cities like Houston and San Diego worry about too much. Riverside, California, where a young attorney, Richard Nixon, was married thirty-eight years ago, is struggling to wall off developers and preserve what remains of its orange groves.

To raise revenues to support a more dependent population, most declining cities raised taxes. As they raised taxes, those who could afford to moved elsewhere. The result is not peculiar to New York, though it is the most extreme case. “For more than a decade,” concluded Governor Carey’s Special Task Force on Taxation, “New York has imposed the highest state and local taxes per capita in the United States. In 1974, the charge was $952.29 per person. This burden was 25 percent higher than the next two states, Hawaii and California, and 55 percent higher than the national average.” In 1977, the Temporary Commission on City Finances released a study—The Effects of Personal Taxes in New York City—which found: “The average tax burden is greater for New York City residents than for residents of the fourteen next largest cities in the United States.… In 1974, the most recent year for which comparative data are available, per capita local taxes averaged $699 in New York City compared to $569 in Boston, the second highest tax-burden city, and $529 in San Francisco, the third highest. Chicago and Los Angeles had local per capita taxes of $213 and $212 respectively.” When state taxes are factored in, they discovered, “the average per capita tax for New York City residents increases to $1,186”—a different figure from that of the Governor’s Special Tax Force—“almost double the average of $632 for the other fourteen cities.” In 1976, according to the U.S. Commerce Department, New York State and local per capita taxes were second to Alaska’s, but that was before the Alaskan pipeline bathed that state in oil. The Empire State’s taxes rose 56 percent above the U.S. average. Texas was 21 percent below the national average; Arkansas, 38 percent below.

New York’s higher taxes mean higher costs. A family of four earning $50,000 a year, said the Commission, ransomed 11.1 percent of its gross income to New York City and State—three times the national average of 3.7 percent. The same family in Los Angeles paid half New York’s rate (5.6 percent); in Boston, 4.4 percent; Atlanta, 4.1 percent; Chicago, 2.3 percent. The same family in Houston or Seattle paid zero. A family earning $25,000 ransomed 6.6 percent to the city and state of New York—almost three times the national average. The same family in Los Angeles paid 3 percent; in Boston, 4 percent; Atlanta, 3.1 percent; Chicago, 2.1 percent. A Houston or Seattle family paid zero. Another way to put it: a family of four earning $20,000 in Houston would need to make $27,071 to have the same disposable income in New York. Or: to take home $25,000, a New York resident would have to earn $33,676—10 percent less than the $30,651 a Connecticut or New Jersey resident would have to earn. To lug home $150,000, a city resident would need to earn $294,114, while a business executive in either of the two neighboring states would need only $251,000—20 percent less. In the face of these numbers, it requires a vivid imagination to blame the federal government for the exodus of middle- and upper-income citizens and businesses from New York. Mayor Koch’s Task Force on Economic Development found, for instance, that “75% of manufacturing jobs lost between 1960 and 1976” moved not to the Sunbelt but to the tri-state