Comment Re:Local testing works? (Score 5, Informative) 778
Moving to the state whose laws work best for you may work for people who can move, but I expect the people affected by these laws are pretty closely representative of the set of people who can't move.
Even when people are supposedly more mobile, moving is a big thing for most people so they do not do it.
Here in the UK we had a 50% tax rate imposed on the very richest a few years ago. There were lots of stories about how this was going to drive away people who were successful abroad but in the end it made very little difference because while these sort of exceeding rich people might threaten to take their family somewhere else, but then when they talk to their wife and she refuses to move more than a 20 minute drive from her family and refuses to move the kids out of school and away from their friends.
A few years ago I wanted to move to the states as there were few companies that I could have worked for that might have appreciated a few niche skills I had picked up in their field. Although I would have been a ton financially better off in the states and we could have bought a much bigger house to start a family in than the 3 bedroom London house we have now, my wife would not have moved that far away from the family support. I could have explained how the US tax code would have benefited us until I was blue in the face but she simple wouldn't have cared enough to pay attention.
The idea that people will move is just a scare story that the rich use to try and maintain the ability to pay less in taxes or employers use to justify being able to pay as little in wages as possible.