The phrase about turning off the lights when one leaves someplace appears to have originated with two real estate agents in Seattle. It was 1971 and Boeing was laying off employees during an economic downturn. It was meant to be humorous, though the unemployed probably didn’t see it that way.

During the Arab oil boycott in 1973, Houston newspapers invoked the phrase as they sought to lure people from the North, which was suffering from high unemployment, fuel shortages and economic stagnation.

Newspaper ads told of job openings with good salaries and benefits.

Now come the folks at Unleash Prosperity, a nonpartisan group focused on “educating policy makers and the public about government policies proven to maximize economic growth,” who have resurrected a form of the phrase (linked to a Billy Joel song) and applied it to today’s elections in New York City and New Jersey. Prosperity’s billboards, which have been placed along major thoroughfares, say respectively: “New Jersey isn’t moving up. Families are moving out.” And “New Yorkers aren’t moving up. They’re moving out.”

Stephen Moore, co-founder of Unleash Prosperity, and a former senior Trump economic adviser writes, “New York has lost nearly 2 million residents to other states during the last decade and New Jersey almost a half million. New York has lost roughly $111 billion in income and New Jersey has lost $31 billion.”

Democrats, who have mostly run New Jersey and New York City (and state) for decades are prisoners of their bad economic philosophy and seem unwilling or unable to change.

A study published last year and billed as “the first-ever systematic analysis of 110 years of state income tax implementation throughout the United States,” highlighted the consequences when taxpayers leave high tax states for states with lower or no state income taxes. It was published in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy and titled “The Introduction of the Income Tax, Fiscal Capacity, and Migration: Evidence from U.S. States” and coauthored by Ugo Antonio Troiano, an economist and associate professor at the University of California, Riverside.

The state-level tax policies from 1900 to 2010 examined in the paper reveal that income tax adopting states increased revenue per capita by 12 percent to 17 percent, but those increases did not correspond to increases in total revenues for the government in monetary terms.

This is because the introduction of state income taxes in the post-World War II era led to out-migration by wealthy Americans.

Unfortunately, the tax-raising Democrats failed to take human nature into account. People who have the resources also have the option of moving to more economically friendly locations. Many have.

Democrats are being held prisoners to their failed ideology by the far left. As a result, more people in New York City, New Jersey and other states with high taxes have their fingers on the light switch and their car engine is running.