- 2.5M worth of real estate bought recently

- 1M of job income

- 1M selling shares that 10xed (some stock option idk)

- driving a 150k $ car

- spending 150k $ over the years in taxable goods

It came around 840'000 $ or around 40.1 %.

I wouldn't say it's that bad, this even includes sales taxes (probably the fairest of all taxes).

With even basic tax optimization (401k, federal deductions) you get that number down to 780'000 $, with something a bit more sophisticated depending on circumstances you can get it easily lower than 600k or 32% ish.

The biggest problem is that people above that tier end up effectively paying less sometimes even in absolute terms just by borrowing against their equity and not triggering taxable events.

Honestly taxes are complicated to implement, I'm not sure how can you implement a progressive yet fair system without loopholes and without severely degrading services (roads, infrastructure, education, healthcare, military, etc, etc).

And every time you decide to cut on services, you are just moving money elsewhere: more inequality -> more social tensions and criminality, you just end up paying way more to live in a safe place and pay for private and public security and prisons.

It's really difficult.

Of course there are still countries where one could park their money outside the OECD members but many of those are not exactly a "safe" place for such assets.

But universal is what we need as humanity.

The will seems to be building up, even in the UK (Polanski) and US (Mamdani, AOC, Sanders).

I'm betting that the success will be replicated in other countries soon and after that its only a matter of time for this to go global.

But this will be interesting show.

did the people ever leave ? NO

If an owner takes out profit, they are punished with high income taxes. So they reinvest in their business, and this is what the government wants because it creates jobs, innovation, products and services, and tax income.

So they've been doing what they have been forced to do by the government. And as a consequence their companies are worth a lot.

Now the government wants to tax them on the company value?

https://www.youtube.com/live/4HpJKPywXqY?si=bb-p558jl_otP25I

In her research she found that many of the ultra-rich people actually have deep/patriotic/nostalgic ties to their home/community and want to invest there. They often use certain tax-evasion measures because everybody else does and she argued that those few ultra-rich people who really just care about minimizing their taxes have already moved everything abroad.

Or, I guess, just don't deal with the US and either don't go there, or hope to not get caught.

Make stock buybacks illegal again too. Overturn Citizen's United unless the head of the company can face charges for the actions of their company.

The concentration of wealth into the highest strata is a recipe for societal collapse seen multiple times in history.

No matter how you tax, the asset-owning class is almost guaranteed to remain in place, because the vast majority of their assets are physical, and cannot be easily moved except at much greater expense than any tax.

I mean, if offshoring took 75 years to achieve, what makes you think that any member of the Parasite Class will be able to pack up and leave within a decade, much less a half decade?

It costs ridiculously insane amounts of money to move a business down the street, and you’re keeping the same employees, and not re-training an entirely new batch of replacements in the new location.

About the only “asset” that can “leave” with anything approaching sub-decade immediacy are the purely digital ones, with a business that is 100% Internet-based and without any physical assets of any kind, where you can spin up a new offshore server and migrate the services to it with just a few mouse clicks.

And those are vanishingly few in number. Most so-called “Internet companies” still have oodles of physical assets, from offices (where return-to-office mandates force employees back into) to land to physical servers sitting in data centres.

And in the end, we have the most telling question: what is the difference with the wealthy leaving due to a tax, and failing to implement that tax in the first place?

NOTHING.

There are no downsides, only upsides. Either they leave and open up room for another entrepreneur to thrive in that spot, or they stay and pay the tax.

Either way, nothing of value is lost by wealth taxation.

Furthermore given whats at stake you would divert 1/10th of those funds to making sure that act never passes.

Especially in UK where The Rich that dont belongs to UK in the first place will of course move and leave. Those who are born and raised are highly unlikely to move.

And perhaps most importantly the question completely ignore the real problem. There isn't a lack of Tax revenue, but the government incompetence to allocate and use it wisely. To raise tax is just saying what we are doing now is absolutely correct and we will continue to do so.

There is another agent (group of agents) in this game and that's other states. Those states are often modeled as passive background places one can move to, but they are often not. They can, and do, react to tax laws in other states. For example, TX could encourage capital flight by offering tax breaks.

I've seen this happen with some companies in Midwest: as the states had to raise taxes some Southern states decide to poach individual companies and offered them to move their HQs there with a bunch of tax rebates and credits and such.

> The tax’s designers, however, think they’ve come up with a clever solution to capital flight: a one-off tax that is retroactive, based on a billionaire’s residency status on January 1, 2026.

That is pretty clever. They could also have an "exit tax" -- "leave but if you've been here for 10 years making your billions, we'll keep some of those billions" kind of a deal.

It’s wild how dominant this proposal is. Not reducing costs. Not cutting benefits. Not a broader tax increase. Not a combination of ideas. Just “f*k these guys in particular.” If this is what passes for governance in California I’d leave too.

https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2025/11/17/do-millionai...

That misses the point. A one-time wealth tax to plug holes in the state's finances reeks of short-termism and desperation, like Chicago selling off its parking meters. Even if I wasn't affected by the tax, I'd be alarmed at the implication. It would have been much better to implement a well thought out and orderly recurring tax on capital gains or whatever.

He's still here, and unlike the PAB SV billionaires, he has no plans to leave because he's seen what places with no/low taxes are like. (TLDR: they have low taxes because nobody would want to live there otherwise. )

Case study: New York City, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Denmark…

The list goes on until they choose; Texas, Florida, Singapore and Dubai.

There is a disrupt joke inthere but i cant think of it right now.

We have already tried that in human history, it's called communism. No one is allowed to take private profit, everyone contributes to the best of their own ability, and everyone consumes according to their needs. It should be utopia because there is no wealth gap and wealth is maximally redistributed. Which is exactly what taxation is designed to do, only to the most extreme.

And I think everyone will agree with me that communism is a miserable failure. The rich may not leave physically but mentally they are checkout -- not willing to work as hard or take as much risk. So the answer is yes, if you tax them, most certainly they will leave physically for haven with lower tax, all things being equalled. Or leave mentally.

But not all things are equalled, so you can still tax them at a somewhat higher rate provided that you can provide other incentives. But still, too much tax will make it more likely for those who are able to to leave. This is almost an axiom.

People are always defending rich people (capital owners) that they invest their wealth. But actually if someone has a billion in the bank the fact that they have that billion is a proof that they didn't invest it. (If they did spend it or invest it the would not have it, now would they?)

A billion that circulates in the economy is much better than a billion that sits in someones bank account. Someone who spends 100% of their income is much better economic citizen than someone who doesn't.

Long term: yes, especially if you combine really high taxes in the 40+% range with consistently rubbish public services

But the real question is not whether people will leave, the question is how many talented hard working people chose not to move to your country in the first place because your taxes were too high. It won't show up in any data, you'll just experience worse economic growth and have to tax everyone else more