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California
After 170 years of population growth — occasionally explosive growth — California is now experiencing population loss for the first time. As foreign immigration and birth rates declined, they no longer offset net losses in state-to-state migration. Since 2010, 7.5 million people have left California while 5.9 million people have come from other states.
That gives rise to a question: Who is leaving California and why?
There is, however, a less obvious subset of those who leave California — high-income families seeking relief from the state’s notoriously high taxes.
The San Francisco Chronicle shed some light on that phenomenon when one of its reporters dove into Internal Revenue Service data that revealed favorite destinations of high-income former San Franciscans.
The newspaper found that 39,000 San Franciscans who had filed federal tax returns for 2018 had moved out of the city before filing 2019 returns. Collectively, they took $10.6 billion in income with them while people who moved to the city during that period reported just $3.8 billion in income.
“The county that saw the wealthiest movers from San Francisco on average was Teton County, Wyoming, home to Jackson Hole and its famed ski resorts,” the Chronicle reported.
“The data showed that 40 different families, comprising 63 people total, filed their 2019 taxes in San Francisco and then filed their 2020 taxes in Teton County, accounting for a total of $37 million in income moving from San Francisco to Teton. That is an average of $586,000 per person, according to the IRS data.”
Two other ski resort-heavy counties made the top 10 destinations of San Francisco’s wealthiest movers. Washoe County, Nevada, which includes Lake Tahoe’s Incline Village, was No. 2 while Summit County, Utah, site of the Park City ski resort, was No. 6. Palm Beach, Florida, was No. 3.
While the Chronicle article cited the popularity of resorts as a destination for wealthy expatriates, the more glaring fact is that their favored new homes are often in states that levy little or no personal income taxes. No-tax states include Wyoming, Nevada, Washington, Texas and Florida. Utah has a flat 4.85% rate.
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The Fashion Page
Laces. Link here.
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The Food Page
A reader introduced me to hoe cakes / hoecakes.
Link here.
A hoecake is cornbread made minimalist—a thin, unleavened round made from the simplest batter (cornmeal, water, and salt), crisp at the edges, glistening on both sides from the fat it was fried in, golden in patches. Inside, it’s dense but creamy, a foil for its best partners—creamed corn, silky braised greens, honey.
A hoecake should be sturdy enough to work as a shovel for whatever is on the plate, but delicate enough to be appealing on its own.
According to a popular story, hoecakes got their name from the slave practice of cooking them on field hoes. If you’ve ever made hoecakes, this sounds like a near impossible task, and the appeal of this origin story is surely its evocation of the industriousness, fortitude, and resilience that defines much early American cooking, particularly African-American cooking.
But the story’s power as a metaphor is stronger than its case as historical fact.
Rod Cofield, author of the paper “How the Hoe Cake (Most Likely) Got its Name,” explains: hoe was a colloquial term for griddle dating back to at least the 1600s in parts of England, where baking cakes on boards or griddles was commonplace.
If we're talking 1600s in England, we're talking Shakespeare.
