The rich can choose where to live, the poor can't.
If you make it hard to be rich, the rich will just go somewhere else, not abide by your rules.
The wealth redistribution narrative is as dumb as the plot of the "The Purge" franchise. If there's going to be a purge you just travel to a country without purge.
>> If you make it hard to be rich, the rich will just go somewhere else, not abide by your rules.
Yes and no. Rich people don't want to live in California simply because of their tax treatment. Rich people don't want to live in London because of the privileges given to bankers. People don't want to live in Vancouver simply because of the real estate market. Rich people want to live in these places because these places are great places in which to live. Weather, politics, safe streets, your wealthy kids not being kidnapped for ransom money, access to ambulance services, clear air/water, not having legions of poor people at your gate every morning, being able to go for a morning jog without bodyguards, not having to bribe the cops every other day ... Rich people care about things beyond lower taxes. Those things are basically the same as everyone else.
Rich people want their bank account to live in offshore tax havens. They don't want to raise children in such places. There is a reason why every Chinese billionaire has property in Vancouver, why every mega celebrity has an apartment in New York and a house in London.
The tech industry likes places geographically distant from Washington DC. They also like unregulated activities. Like software monopolies, ad-tech, crypto, gigs, the metaverse, etc. (and now, AI).
If it's too new or too abstract to be illegal, you will find a California company for it.
The race for technological advancement is not to make the world a better place, it's a race against legislation to find things that are not yet regulated and profit for them for as long as possible.
1. Enter unregulated market
2. Profit as much as possible
3. Use lobby to keep regulation away
4. Once it's so regulated that it's hard to make money from it, find another unregulated thing to do
Examples: Google's Doubleclick fiasco, Uber, Airbnb, Coinbase, etc.
Some of the tech industry, mostly on the consumer side of the market. The military and financial services tech companies still love the east coast (MIT/Boston, electric boat, NYC etc). Much of California's tech sector also grew from the aviation industry, which came to California because of weather and geography far more than culture or politics.
That's the effect of thousands of tech workers leaving. In terms of relative wealth, tech workers have more in common with restaurant and service workers than they do with billionaires: https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/
The presence or absence of a billionaire in a given jurisdiction won't be the deciding factor for those industries as evidenced by every other city without tech billionaires that has a thriving restaurant and service industry.
Do you remember when SF passed a dumb tax law and Stripe had to move their office out of town? Then all the office workers had to go too (or go remote), then the completely obvious effect described above happened?
I remember. My friends in the restaurant industry remember.
Condescension doesn't make your argument more compelling. Your "friends in the restaurant industry" would be better served by curbing income inequality rather than kowtowing to billionaires.
This description always amuses me because it leaves out all these minor details, like the fact that most rich people still need pilots and planes to “just go somewhere else,” and that pilots aren’t all rich, and planes require whole fleets of not rich people to maintain them.
This is not financial advice and I am not a financial advisor.
I've read about airline staff including pilots on poverty wages, but I would be astonished if that included anyone who flies private jets for the very wealthy.
Explain to me exactly how you imagine this going down. You've got, say, a billion dollars, not cash, and you've decided to flee from your tax obligations because you think it will be cheaper.
First example that comes to mind is 'not domiciled for tax purposes' . In the UK, our prime minister's wife benefited from declaring her tax domicile as India. She changed it to the UK when it looked like harming his political career. Either she loves him more than the money, or they have a plan to ensure this remains an economically rational choice.
This is not an argument for your position, it is an argument for the converse. England has crafted laws that allow its wealthy citizens to evade taxes while retaining their citizenship.
Not defending Mr and Mrs Sunak, which is another story, but the UK Domicile thing has been around for many years and no Govt, left or right, has ever attempted to change it.
The Brown administration (ie Labour) did change the rules so that it was no longer possible to somehow be "Not domiciled" in the UK and yet be in Parliament setting rules - including the tax rules - for the country you're supposedly not living in.
Several Tories decided that not paying taxes was better than sitting in Parliament and so they quit as a result of this.
If you make it hard to be rich, the rich will just go somewhere else, not abide by your rules.
The wealth redistribution narrative is as dumb as the plot of the "The Purge" franchise. If there's going to be a purge you just travel to a country without purge.