There is a tax angle to just about everything, and professional sports are no exception. Legendary former New England Patriots Head Coach Bill Belichick was reminded of that recently when he waded into tax debates with some off-the-cuff remarks about the impact of state income taxes on players on ESPN’s Pat McAfee Show.
In Belichick’s brief comments on the topic, he referenced the so-called millionaires tax in Massachusetts, a 4 percent surtax that went into effect in 2023, applying to taxpayers with more than $1 million in Massachusetts-source income. Belichick claimed that the surtax makes it more difficult to attract players to New England compared with states with no income tax, invoking the state’s unflattering “Taxachusetts” nickname.
Debates about how athletes respond to state income taxes are a microcosm of broader arguments over how taxes affect taxpayers’ residency decisions. Individual-level taxpayers have been, on net, moving from high-tax states to low-tax states at an accelerating rate, while Chevron recently became the latest Fortune 500 company to relocate from California to Texas. These trends pose difficulties for advocates of higher state taxation of businesses and higher-income individuals, who often attempt to downplay them.
Read the full story here.