Travis Brown of How Money Walks, a website that vividly illustrates how wealth and people move around the country using IRS data, has put together a map illustrating how money and people move throughout New Mexico and to/from what states people and money are coming to/leaving our state.
Check out the full series of charts here.
Mr. Brown’s original presentation along with an interview by Capitol Report New Mexico can be found here.
It would seem that taxes play a larger role in how people move around the nation than they do within New Mexico where the phenomenon is one of people leaving rural areas, even booming ones in the oil patch, to live in the Rio Grande Valley.
Also, people are moving to Bernalillo County, but their money is moving out of the County.
The charts referenced in the second (one-sentence) paragraph are a hoot. It looks like they show the New Mexico counties correctly geographically, but they seem to have New JERSEY county names superimposed on the maps. My husband and I moved to NM from NJ some years ago, after 17-plus years of living in NJ, so we know the NJ county names well, and didn’t expect to have this flashback!
This is probably something that Paul Gessing or Travis Brown might want to correct. I don’t know if it’s an artifact of putting these on the web. I can’t find a chart for NM in the book.
My apologies. The NJ county names appear to be an artifact of Firefox. No county names at all show up when I access these charts through Chrome or Internet Explorer. I have no clue as to what is going on with Firefox.