Translation: Sedgwick County is bleeding income.
This is according to IRS and U.S. Census Bureau data examined by Travis Brown and presented online at HowMoneyWalks.com. This is a website that is companion to the book How Money Walks — How $2 Trillion Moved Between the States, and Why It Matters.
According to the publisher:
Between 1995 and 2010, millions of Americans moved between the states, taking with them over $2 trillion in adjusted gross incomes. Two trillion dollars is equivalent to the GDP of California, the ninth largest in the world. It’s a lot of money. Some states, like Florida, saw tremendous gains ($86.4 billion), while others, like New York, experienced massive losses ($58.6 billion). People moved, and they took their working wealth with them. The question is, why? Why did Americans move so much of their income from state to state? Which states benefited and which states suffered? And why does it matter? Using official statistics from the IRS, How Money Walks explores the hows, whys, and impact of this massive movement of American working wealth.
Kansas, as a state, lost $3.15 billion in income during the period covered by the book. That colors Kansas a moderate shade of pink on a map of all states. Pink, or red, in this case, means like it does in accounting: A loss of money.
Looking at a map of Kansas counties, we see that Sedgwick County is a bright shade of red. From 1992 to 2010, Sedgwick County lost $1.12 billion in annual AGI (adjusted gross income).
To put these numbers in perspective, in 2009 AGI in Kansas was $61.7 billion, and in Sedgwick County, $10.6 billion. So Sedgwick County has lost some ten percent of its income. And that’s on an annual basis.
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