In 2020, many reporters and analysts portrayed state and local governments as facing doom‐​and‐​gloom with falling revenues and slashed services. I didn’t buy the grim narrative.

Amid the outcry over George Floyd’s death and subsequent protests, some people are calling for defunding the police.

A Wall Street Journal news article by David Harrison claims, “State and local government spending and employment levels didn’t fully recover from the 2007-09 recession until last fall, a decade after the downturn ended and only a few months before the coronavirus led to a new round of cuts.”

I reported that state and local governments in New York spend twice as much as governments in Florida. New York also has a larger bureaucracy.

New York and Florida have similar populations of 20 million and 21 million, respectively. But state and local governments in New York spent twice as much.

New Census data show that Americans are continuing to move from high-tax to low-tax states. One of the largest migration flows is from New York to Florida.

Yesterday, I looked at migration from high-tax to low-tax states. Today, the Wall Street Journal focuses on wealthy tax exiles from the Northeast in Florida.

Ninety years ago, two-thirds of government spending in America was state-local and one-third was federal. Today, it is the reverse with about two-thirds federal and one-third state-local.