Boston, Massachusetts, by Kevin Gill, Licensed under CC
As of late, the media has latched onto a report from the progressive think tank, IPS (Institute for Policy Studies). This report claims that Massachusetts has increased its number of millionaires since passing its controversial “millionaire tax”, otherwise known as the fair-share amendment.
This claim is actually quite impressive. It managed to hit three logical fallacies at once (Post hoc, correlation-causation, and cherry picking, if you must know), a feat reserved for the most incoherent of ideas. Yet, it seems intuitively plausible:
The number went up, and conservatives said the number would go down: they must be wrong about everything.
According to this “study” (if it can be called that), the millionaire population in MA grew by 38.6%, or around 170,000 people, from 2022 to 2024. Sounds like a lot – too much, actually, considering the state’s population grew by around 110,000 over that time period.
One doesn’t take up article writing because they’re good at math, but 170,000 seems, at first glance, to be much larger than 110,000.
This discrepancy is accounted for by the fact that IPS measured the state’s number of new millionaires by IRS return, meaning that if someone worth $999,999 made some extra money that year, they would be considered a “new” millionaire.
The IPA’s questionable choice of measurement allows news outlets to imply the rich are immigrating to MA in droves, when this is certainly not the case.
In fact, this data is so imprecise that millionaires could actually have fled the state en masse, and the IPS would have missed it.
Over the same time period as the study, the stock market made a rebound after its COVID slump, and Massachusetts’ median home prices skyrocketed. Luckily, the media doesn’t have to consider whether these factors influenced this contrived influx of millionaires. Instead, they get to bizarrely claim that the money MA stole from their actual millionaires and put into public transportation, a notoriously huge money maker (ignore the $6 billion budget shortfall), stoked some kind of economic revolution, despite the state underperforming the nation’s GDP growth from 2022-24.
Suffice to say, this study does not disprove conservatives’ concerns about the millionaire tax. It actually doesn’t prove or disprove anything – one might go so far as to say it’s less a “study” and more a Roshak test for the politically disabled.
Instead of attempting to justify Massachusetts’s millionaire tax by fudging the numbers, think tanks like IPS should be trying to get the state to set its budget in order, so that it can fund basic programs like education and public transportation without hurting the people who benefit their economy most.
