Recently, I attended a zoom meeting with the new Dean Of the business school at West Virginia University and others from the community. A question was asked of the Dean whether or not the elimination of the WV income tax would aid in attracting new business to the state. After some discussion I was asked what I thought about it. I stated that coming from New York State I did not think people here new what taxes were and got a great response of laughter. We are seeing our governor and others working to eliminate the income tax and using the business attraction as their reason but really they are( I'm removing my conservative hat) transferring the tax from the upper income people that pay most of it to the lower income people that will pay it through their higher sales tax and other taxes on consumer goods. The tax does not defer anyone moving to WV other than a few retirees that would probably go to Florida anyway.
When I moved here over forty years ago the income tax was about the same as I had in NY except it went to the top rate quicker which I had to pay right away. The tax that I found to be troubling was the personal property tax that I did not have in NY. It was the most insidious tax I had ever seen and was being paid by every one in the state. A tax on your car, boat, motorcycle, goat or cow was new to me and probably is to any one coming into the state where such a tax doesn't exit. I was working at the local airport as a flight instructor and saw many airplane owners that moved their planes to Penn. to avoid this tax. Some of the airplanes that had been bought for $5000. years ago were being taxed at $5000. which caused them to have to rebuy their planes every year. Working for a corporation that bought a company plane it was interesting that it was one of only two corporate airplanes that were hangered in West Virginia. Some of the other corporate planes were stationed out of state to avoid the tax. Later I took care of our corporate airplanes and saw how much the taxes on them were. It was an astounding amount of money but my employer was loyal to WV and said we would pay them and not move the planes. The personal property tax on airplanes was later reduced to try to bring in more aircraft and bolster our airport support. The tax was not reduced on anything else and I have to keep paying for my car over and over again. If there was ever a tax that could persuade me to not move to a state it would be the personal property tax.
Now back to the income tax which has some parts that need corrected and I would suggest that the politicians that would eliminate the taxx first change part of it and take another look later to see if the changes worked. A few years ago my sister-in-law was interned in a nursing home. She had an income that was $20,000. less than the cost of the nursing home. She paid no federal income tax but had to pay WV income tax on the full amount or her income. I brought this to Manchin's attention when he was running for governor but he forgot about after he got elected. She paid this tax until she died and still paid it in the year that she died. Another change is the fact that all contributions made in the state are after tax dollars and there is no exemption for contributions to Churches or any other charities. There used to be a NIP fund that allowed some charities to get an amount of tax credits from the state to give to donors as part of their contributions but that seems to have disappeared. The last change that is necessary would be to stop taxing Social Security benefits. This tax reduces the retirement benefits of all retirees and really hurts many. As Johnson and Clinton taxed part of SS benefits this state taxes all of them. These changes in the income tax code will cause the loss of some revenue but would help a lot of people and charities. Rather than eliminate to income tax it would help even more people if the personal property tax was eliminated on some items and reduced on automobiles. These two tax changes could actually lure both business and retirees to the state and help grow our economy and population. Of course politicians really can't use common sense and still get re-elected so we probably will see only changes that bring in re-election dollars and forget the people that could really use the help.
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