> The same can't be said for investments that haven't been made yet.
We can debate counterfactuals all day long. People invest when there are profits to be made and refrain when there aren't. Everything else is bullshit.
> I wonder why that'd be the case...
Definitely not wealth taxes because most European countries don't have them. It might be because they don't have the world's reserve currency. Or the million other reasons commentators and economists have written about elsewhere.
It's not really a counterfactual. My point was that deployed capital is less subject to flight, so using that as a measure for a policy's impact is incomplete and short sighted.
>People invest when there are profits to be made and refrain when there aren't. Everything else is bullshit.
This is also incomplete. People also seek the highest returns. That's why the magnificent 7 tech companies (which happen to be all American) have seen their valuations skyrocket, whereas the appetite for Volkswagen is tepid, despite it turning a profit. That's not to say there's no investment in Europe, but based on startup funding and IPOs, it's pretty clear that the US is the favored place to invest.
>Definitely not wealth taxes because most European countries don't have them.
My point is that europe is generally business-hostile. Wealth taxes is only one of the factors. There's also high taxes and onerous regulations.
This is correct, I called out high income taxes as a problem in my original post. There's no point in working harder when more than half the gain is taken away.
Wealth taxes != income taxes.
> onerous regulations
When I wrote "the million other reasons" - this is one of them.
We can debate counterfactuals all day long. People invest when there are profits to be made and refrain when there aren't. Everything else is bullshit.
> I wonder why that'd be the case...
Definitely not wealth taxes because most European countries don't have them. It might be because they don't have the world's reserve currency. Or the million other reasons commentators and economists have written about elsewhere.