For simplicity sake, let's assume that legislative barriers will impede a scenario where someone working in high finance in NYC can WFH all the time and moves to Thailand and gets rich on the income.

However, what about the scenario where jobs can be distributed remotely and USA population start dispersing.

For example, company X that currently has most of its people come to offices in NYC and paying rent for office spaces while employees bear NYC cost, might put a lot of jobs remote.

Then, John decides to move to Florida, Adam decides to move to somewhere else and so on. That would make NYC cost of living less with more availability (for those who stay, such as healthcare workers).

Sure, there won't be all of a sudden an easy ride. However, that would average out salaries and cost of living quite well and there won't be any high concentration anymore.

Pls discuss. Keen on hearing some thoughts. Probably not as simple as I think it is.

Liberals are too stupid to leave the cities


Also I worked remote before all of this started. And at a company that could very easily be 100% remote. We were one of the first to send those in offices home when this began. The people who were working in offices have been clamoring to get back in the office as soon as possible.

For some weird reason, there's a lot of people who actually like being in the office.

Makes no sense to me.

Not to mention that IT work is not the only type of work that can be done remotely.

Literally every white-collar job in offices is done through a PC.

I can just imagine being a programmer in Sillicon Valley. You get paid a ton, but your cost of living is much higher. So if you move to another place with less cost of living and less salary. But wouldn't the money saving from housing would make it still worth it?

The main issue I see are taxes and and cost of living adjustments.

On taxes, I can’t see state/local/national governments willingly giving up their tax base. They will want someone to set up a “permanent” residence, in order to get that workers tax dollars. However, the location where the person is working will want that workers tax dollars too. So I’m not sure how that would work without the worker getting taxed and the employer being taxed multiple times.

The other issue, is that pay rate is regional. Companies will have multiple location factors for employees in differing areas. For example, companies will pay workers more in Los Angeles than in Tampa because Los Angeles is more expensive. They keep the pay proportional however, so the person in Los Angeles would be paid the equivalent of the person in Tampa. So the issue is when the person in Los Angeles who is receiving their salary based upon living in Los Angeles, decides to move to Kansas. The company isn’t going to want to pay Los Angeles rates in Kansas. So how is the company going to monitor that so they can do a cost of living adjustment.

This also means that their accounting teams have to grow to support these possible changes. Which means more payroll costs for the company.

I’m completely for working from home and out of whatever geographic location. However, there are major tax and cost of living issues that governments and employers are going to have to deal with and those changes aren’t easily solvable.

I could see it happening in certain sectors for sure. Like the tech enclaves in Silicon Valley -- why blow up people's wages for high cost of living areas when these people specifically work with tech and can be anywhere in the country (or world)? And if that were to happen, there would be a huge impact on the local economies as well. Real estate would deflate, tax revenues would be dispersed, etc etc



But IMO there will be a real push back on the whole WFH thing. It's not conducive to team building, it's not conducive to training and passing skills on to other employees, it can increase the risk of compliance and substance abuse issues, and who knows how many other considerations

That’s pretty messed up, especially if the person still resides in the city that they were hired under. If anything, there should be an increase/expense for office space in the home, electricity, internet, and utilities, since the employee is now absorbing those costs. This is doubly so if the employee is a W2 worker and not a 1099.

People can deduct those charges from their taxes if they are self-employee or 1099, but the W2 employee currently cannot.