When it comes to taxes, millionaires have short fuses. Ratchet up their rates and they'll blow you off and move to a low-tax, or no-tax, state.

Or so goes one argument against taxing the rich: States that levy a “millionaires tax” risk chasing those millionaires away to Florida, Texas, and other places with no income tax. Hedge fund manager David Tepper's recent decision to move from New Jersey to Florida, possibly creating a billionaire-size hole in Jersey’s budget, raised alarms. Golf great Phil Mickelson, shortly after his infamous Dean Foods stock trade, complained about his high tax rate in California and threatened to move to Florida.

Now, a study based on 13 years of tax data finds that most millionaires don’t move cross-country just to avoid a tax bill. It turns out that the rich, while perhaps different from us, aren’t all that mobile. When they do move, it’s often for reasons that have nothing to do with taxes. For one thing, they appear to like the beach.

The study, published in the June issue of the American Sociological Review, suggests that states—and countries—may have some leeway to raise taxes on the wealthy without scaring away their tax base. It has obvious political implications, possibly serving as ammunition for those who favor taxing the rich. It could help advance the arguments of presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, for example, who have both proposed higher taxes on upper-income Americans.

It could also influence voters who, in as many as four states—California, Colorado, Maine, and Minnesota—will decide in November whether to raise taxes on residents in the top brackets. 

Rich people do move for tax reasons, but only about 2.2 percent of the time, the study estimates, with little impact on revenues in the states they leave behind. If states increase their top tax rate by 10 percent, they risk losing just 1 percent of their population of millionaires, the researchers found, using a statistical model based on millionaires' past movements from state to state.

“Millionaire tax flight is occurring, but only at the margins of significance,” write the authors, Stanford University sociology professor Cristobal Young, his Stanford colleague Charles Varner, and two U.S. Treasury Department economists, Ithai Lurie and Richard Prisinzano.

The researchers analyzed 45 million tax records, covering every filer who reported income of at least $1 million in any year from 1999 to 2011, and found that the rich are in fact less likely to move around than the poor. Typically, about half a million households report such an income, and only 2.4 percent of these taxpayers move from state to state in any given year. That compares with 2.9 percent of the general population and 4.5 percent of those earning about $10,000 a year.

Why are the wealthy, with all their resources, more likely to stay in one spot? The study notes that millionaires are likelier to be married, have kids, and own businesses, all conditions that tend to make moving more difficult. Wealthy people often form deep roots in their communities, ties that helped them succeed in the first place.

“Most millionaires are the ‘working rich,’ ” the study notes, with wealth that flows from the particular places where they’ve built business relationships. For a certain kind of tech entrepreneur, low-tax New Hampshire and Tennessee are no substitute for Silicon Valley. Wall Street lawyers need to stay near Wall Street. For a famous actor or director, Hollywood, Fla., is nothing like Hollywood, Calif.

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