Podcast: How Money Walks Out of Pennsylvania

Last year, nearly 42,000 Pennsylvanians left the state to pursue their dreams elsewhere—that's one person every 12 and a half minutes. Why is money walking out of Pennsylvania?

That’s the topic of the second episode of Commonwealth Insight, our new, bi-weekly podcast featuring state and national entrepreneurs, policy makers, and thought leaders tackling issues critical to Pennsylvania's economic future.

First, we talk with Travis Brown, Forbes contributor and author of How Money Walks, who says Pennsylvanians are “voting with their feet and taking their wallets” to states like Florida, North Carolina, and Arizona because of our state’s tax burden.

He explains that states compete with each other to attract investment and residents:

Just like the Steeler Nation would look competitively across state lines and do the scouting and reporting to see how we can be better and better next year against the New England Patriots, every competitor would look to the North and say: How can we attract these residents and how do we keep the residents we have?

Travis says there are three major policy areas Pennsylvania can change to be more competitive: regulation, taxation, and litigation.

To reverse out-migration and make Pennsylvania attractive to families and businesses, we must avoid higher taxes, more government spending, and greater regulation.

We also talk with Bob Dick, senior policy analyst for the Commonwealth Foundation, about how the Pennsylvania state budget works—and doesn’t work. Bob says state spending is growing beyond its citizens' ability to fund it, resulting in tax hikes that kill jobs and slow private sector growth. The politically unpopular, but fiscally responsible, solution is to control spending.

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