‘Taxifornia’ may get its revenge

The “Texas Miracle” is seeming less miraculous these days, said Christopher Hooks. Texans have had a tendency to count their state’s “wins” by “how many new residents and companies it could induce to move here” from California. But after a lot of pandemic-era boasting about “technologists picking up sticks in Taxifornia and moving to the Lone Star State,” there’s been a major shift in the narrative. Last month, Oracle, one of the biggest names to relocate to Austin during the pandemic, announced it was moving its headquarters again— this time to Nashville, citing its “strength as a center of the American health-care industry.” Then Tesla said it was laying off 2,700 workers at its Austin Cybertruck plant. Perhaps “some of the Californians who moved here during the pandemic realized they had traded Edenic weather for 110-degree summers and no income tax, and they decided that the income tax wasn’t that bad.” Besides the weather, though, they may have realized that “Texas is not a low-tax, low-service state, as is commonly held.” It has no income tax, but property taxes are exorbitant, while “the quality of the state’s services has not improved” in line with the tax burden. And without Covid to worry about, tech leaders are finding they don’t want to miss any chances to “rub shoulders in Palo Alto.”