MSNBC's Hall Notes 'Boom Towns' in South, Fails to Consider Low Taxes May Be to Credit

MSNBC "NewsNation" anchor and Texas native Tamron Hall was delighted to find that four Lone Star cities made it to Forbes.com's list of "The Next Big Boom Towns in the U.S."

"Forbes [magazine] says many of the cities on the list have some of the best job creation records in the nation," Hall noted as she introduced contributor Joel Kotkin, who authored the July 6 piece.

Kotkin identified the nation's new 10 boom towns, five of which are in states without a personal income tax (Florida and Texas) and one, Nashville, Tenn., where the state levies person taxes only on dividend and interest, but not salary or wage, income.

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What's more, the five states represented in Kotkin's top 10 -- excluding the District of Columbia which also made the list -- fared well in George Mason's Mercatus Center's "Freedom in the 50 States" survey released on July 7.

Yet neither Hall nor Kotkin spent any time in their three-and-a-half minute segment exploring how tax and regulatory policy may be driving business expansion and hence job creation in states that are economically freer than others. Kotkin subtly hinted that #6 boom city Washington, D.C. was explained by massive government spending, saying it was "not too hard to figure out why they're doing well."

Hall posited that the reason for population growth in many of the Southern cities on the list was a lower cost-of-living, although she failed to explore if tax and regulatory policy were partly to credit for that:

Are we seeing this migration to the South because of, for example, you get more for your money if the housing market is doing well in that state, for example. I mean, when you look at what you get in New York City compared to what you can get in Raleigh, the ease of life also as you factor it in, is that what we're seeing here: People migrating to quite honestly where they money may go further?

Towards the end of the segment, Hall noted that San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York City were at the bottom of the Forbes list. Again, neither Hall nor Kotkin examined how tax and regulatory policies are hurting those iconic metropolitan areas.

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