TLDR Norway’s recent wealth-tax increases caused some very rich people to leave, but the “billionaire exodus” was economically much smaller than the headlines suggested—and the tax still raised a lot more revenue without detectable damage to business investment.
I doubt there's a way to structure this perfectly given one has to start from the baseline of these taxes being introduced, but is 21-25 a reasonable benchmark?
Naively, it felt like a lot of fluctuations and rubberbanding occurred right after Covid which wouldn't necessary make representative set.
I mean there are some small countries that have absolutely benefitted by giving billionaire expats gentle treatment and keeping taxes low. Dubai, Singapore etc.
Totally fair to claim this cannot scale to a "big" country, but it absolutely works to attract capital.
Now that we have the socialist Trump doctrine established with the help of the tech billionaires, we have a precedent for going forward - partially nationalize the private entities.
Start with the startups, and move into the equity funds and family offices. Once you hit certain thresholds, you pay a 2.5% wealth tax or provide 1% equity, capped at 25%.
It’s totally legal now as the toadies on the Supreme Court have adopted an expansive interpretation of executive power.
The "billionaire flight" problem actually illustrates perfectly why you need a wealth tax in the first place: to prevent billionaires from having undue levels of power and consequence on the populus. When you let individuals accumulate outright unreasonable amounts of money you give them a single random individual, with no governing credentials, whose choices should have no bearing on others the ability to indirectly effect the economic fate of thousands or millions of other people just because of their selfishness (to the extent that effects actually materialize, which to large extent they don't anyway...) It's outright laughable that any government would consider giving individuals such power over the fates of the people they are supposed to serve, represent, protect (at least in the liberal democratic tradition).
Humanity should not strive for kingship, whether minted through "god given right" or coin. We should strive for collective, distributive, balanced control of resources.
It's hard to take anyone seriously when they make these kind of ludicrous, absolutist claims. Yes, it's been tried, and continues to be tried, by literally every country on earth, in various formulations. Maybe we haven't quite hit on the winning formula yet, but that's no reason to stop trying.
If you'd read any history, you'd know we'd tried pure unchecked capitalism without redistribution before, too. Late 17th century Britain comes to mind. I don't want to spoil the story too much, but it turns out that "doesn't work" either.
I have. Read up on the USSR, China, Vietnam, Cuba, Cambodia, etc., under communism. Nothing like that has occurred under capitalism. I suggest "The Black Book of Communism" for you. 100 million dead.
> it turns out that "doesn't work" either.
Google sez: "the standard of living for the laboring population in late 17th-century England generally rose"
The type of billionaire to be so much of a knob to actually leave over this is exactly the kind of billionaire you want to leave and free yourself and your countrymen of. Some of the most selfish, greedy, maniacal people who will tell the law to bend for them to get out of their way.
People don’t like having their stuff stolen. Maybe that’s regrettable, but it’s a strong and universal preference that has important policy consequences!
Usually these taxes are like 5% or some piss away figure, for someone with more money than they could ever spend. The position to move on that teensy sum for someone so otherwise capitalized is so radical and hardline, its almost a tacit support of anarchy. All the more reason to kick those sorts out from your country where they might muck about and pervert the government further towards their own benefit.
Sure it is piss away when they are in fact billionaires. You know what 95% of a billionaire is right? Basically still a billionaire. 950-millionaire, how middle class! Breadlines next for them!
You are right though, who am I to say who has too much money? I am only a wage slave. I don't know how to manage millions let alone billions like God Emperor Zuck. Maybe it would be better if he had even more of my money and more of yours as well. Better yet, lets wind down the state medicaid program and allow him to keep more money under his name. That money to treat my neighbors would be better spent on Musk buying back meta stock, or maybe an even larger boat. Let's wind it all down. Save money not having to print any dollars and just wire it to Zuck and Trump and Lutnick and friends.
My lord... Taxing billionaires feel more like punishing them out of envy than improving society to people like you and DSA. No matter how much they/their companies carry the economy with taxes, jobs etc, it's still not enough so they must be made poor to please the ego right?
When zucks gigantic boat pulls up and drops anchor, how can I not look at that and see the equivalent of a tick engorged with my blood? There's a lot of money to be made in making people miserable to be sure, doesn't mean I want that sort of business operating in my country, taking advantage of its institutions and people to fatten some tick like zuck.
Be gone, bloodsuckers! I will seek employment at places of businesses that are not so foolish to waste so much money on a chief executive. And wouldn't you know, that is the vast bulk of them. The vast bulk of business owners and executives are not in fact billionaires. That represents a failing. Zuck took advantage of his legal rights to the company to enable that compensation. If the shareholders had better control of the shares with voting rights (zuck possesses super shares so that he cannot lose majority voting control) they would have never let that happen for zuck. He is as much a parasite to his own investors as he is to wider society. Greater even, as that is more directly their money that he is spending fueling up that boat.
Jz because of one billionaire, you wanna punish the whole class of billionaires? Is it enough trade off for you that we must be made poorer cz some rich person bought a yacht? Where's your blood coming from lol? It's zuck's property so he can do whatever he wants.. just like how I can do whatever I want with my property.. it ain't like I'm not being subsided by their incredible jobs and taxes which govt takes and redistributes to people who behave like they're owed that money when it's the hardwork/ideas of his.. are you not aware of economic arguments for yacht and how many people are employed due to that alone which he bought out of his own wealth? Why are these economic illiterates infested the hacker news man? It used to be so good who reasoned amazingly well.. look at the state of it now.. it's like we regressed to primates with base impulses.. we're the richest we've ever been and people themselves are satisfied with their economic status but the envy seems to never go away..
Fun story. Massachusetts decided they were going to go after wealthy people by taxing the sale of yachts built in the state. The wealthy simply bought yachts elsewhere, and many thousands of craftsmen were out of a job. The state rescinded the tax.
Yes, a major problem of taxing the billionaires is that they are much more mobile than the rest of us. That is one of many features which help the rich get richer. Once you get to the point where you can live on less than 1% of your wealth annually, you and your descendants won't ever need to work a day in your life, and can migrate around the world, forever consuming the fruit of others labour.
That being said, in the context of the California billionaire tax on the horizon, I mean most of them are clearly bluffing. If taxes were really such a dealbreaker for them, they wouldn't be in California to begin with. That is perhaps one of the absolute worst places in the US to live to minimize your tax burden. NYC is terrible for that too, and yet...
... and yet Florida is booming with rich people that migrated there to avoid taxes.
Like Jeff Bezos. And I personally know a couple wealthy people who moved there to avoid recent taxes. A real estate agent I talked to recently said that half her clients were selling their homes to move away from WA taxes.
Seattle has many vacant office buildings, and Amazon is shifting thousands of its workers to Bellevue due to the taxes. Starbucks moved its HQ to Nashville.
Punishment? Come on. Taxes are not punishment. Especially not when you are worth, once again because people seem to be missing this, a billion dollars.
By all means, let Zuck and Musk and their ilk become trillionaires. That's definitely going to make our lives better. It should trickle down after all. Waiting any day now.
It did trickle down but you are too dense to see that it did. Trickle down economics is basically supply side economics but what would I know. Your envious ilk would doom us all because you are economically illiterate to see the arguments. I didn't say taxation is punishment but your arguments for wealth taxes are similar to punishment because you are not looking to maximise tax revenue, as there are much better ways to do things like Land Value Tax, but you like wealth taxes because you are jealous/afraid and want to punish them for the sin of being wealthy and powerful.
I'm not jealous or afraid or taking a moral position. I'm taking a logical position. One person controlling a billion dollars is simply a failing of the economy. Pass land value tax too. I like taxes. I want billionaires to pay more however the means.
Me directly, no. Someone in our economy does though. Money that would otherwise go to some other use, over gilding Zucks toilet bowl perhaps.
The irony of places like NYC and SF: so much need from education to sheltering and feeding homeless to building out transit or bettering healthcare outcomes. And yet, two hands raise in the air in a shrug, no money for it is the claim. But also yet, steps away from these problems in these two cities, mindbogglingly vast flows of money, the skim of which would solve all these problems occurring outside the doorways of these buildings.
Take any non-billionaire and ask them if, given equal options A and B, they'd prefer to spend X% more on option B. They'll say "no." Billionaires aren't magically different. You'd do the same. This isn't people leaving because they're immoral.
I think recognizing that is important because, whatever your goals are, you likely won't reach them unless your actions correspond to reality. Put yourself in a departing billionaire's shoes for a moment. A country has put together enough political momentum and popular opinion to make taxing you in particular at a rate higher than your countrymen something viable and well supported. Does that sort of antagonistic climate sound like the home you want to spend your remaining years in? No, of course not. The only time I'm willing to not be the sort of "knob" who leaves that sort of nonsense is when I choose to be the kind of "knob" who fights back against such impropriety.
Are some, maybe most, of the departing billionaires selish, greedy, and maniacal? Sure, probably. Is the fact that they're leaving evidence of that? No, absolutely not.
Going back to my main point, that if your views don't line up with reality then you're likely to make or suggest the wrong courses of action, there are remarkably few worldviews I think are consistent with "we should selectively tax billionaires and everyone who disagrees can fuck off if they want to and we'll be better off therefore." Your statements seem reasonably aligned with <maximize some definition of happiness amongst non-billionaires> from a preferences standpoint, but even for that goal I don't think your proposed actions are close to correct. Other goals seem even less aligned.
I'm already in their shoes on this because I already pay taxes on my income. And you know what? I'd pay even more taxes. I like paying taxes. I vote for more taxes. They help poor people and build infrastructure and fund education systems and I like all that. I know for a lot of the billionaire class though, the thought of a poor person getting a hot meal out of the rain keeps them up at night. Given their lobbying efforts, seems clear they'd rather us go hungry, uneducated, and be in poor health.
No, they aren't like you or I at all. You'd actually probably loan me a buck if I asked you.
I think that's exactly my point though. I previously said something along the lines of "the billionaires are mostly bad." You don't even want to give the concession. They're all bad. I'm fine discussing under that framing -- I don't agree with it, but let's start there and see what we find.
Okay, great. What now? Your framing was that the sort of billionaire who wants to leave because of billionaire-specific tax hikes is not the sort of person you want in your country anyway.
(a) I still haven't seen any evidence that you think that leaving is itself evidence of any particular wrongdoing. Your argument is something along the lines of (i) billionaires are always bad, and (ii) they're so different/bad that attempting to apply a comparison to you or I is unfounded in the first place. That might all be true, but you could've dropped it into any discussion about billionaires. The discussion about wealth taxes is seemingly irrelevant to your argument and also to your point.
(b) The thing you said is that we don't want those people here anyway, so let them leave. That's not consistent with my attempt at an empathetic understanding of your viewpoint. I think you'd much rather they stay and contribute. If that's the case, tribal conversations about in groups and out groups aren't especially useful. As an example of something more productive, we could talk about how wealth taxes could include provisions for moving wealth out of a country (to mitigate the damage from 2nd-order effects of such legislation), how they could be more stringent about which people qualify (if you can "vacation" in a country 300 days per year and not pay a wealth tax, is that functionally different to a billionaire with a team of lawyers from the wealth tax not existing and the billionaire living without issue in the country in question?), etc.
For that matter, if the point is that they aren't like us at all and I can't generate anecdotes to relate to them (an idea I disagree with, but I'm rolling with it for the moment to see what happens), what's to say that things aren't similarly unfathomable regarding their philanthropy? You'd happily pay more taxes. What if those taxes are used to set the national guard on our own citizens and stifle their voting efforts? What if via your personal connections you can ensure instead that those funds actually go to feeding a poor person a hot meal?
On the one hand, I get it. I see rich people screwing us left and right, seemingly just because they don't even recognize that we're people too. On the other, they're also just people, with their own motivations, I want to be cautious overly maligning any individual because of a large fraction of bad actors, and I especially want to be cautious about distracting ourselves from our actual goals and the things which we can do to achieve them.
My argument is simple. If you are so petty over the prospect of a single digit percent tax on your billion of dollars of wealth so as to say "I will take my ball and go home and also publicly whine about taking my ball and going home," then please take your ball and go home. Let the more serious billionaires who aren't so petty stay behind and hopefully use their wealth to do something more productive than their current modus operandi of being a human version of Smaug laying on his horde.
By all means if they are that petty, I think they ought to leave and we'd be alright without them. I'm willing to bet most don't leave because in the case of the potential Californian wealth tax, California is already a high tax state. And yet, there they are, paying high taxes to live like mere kings in California, when they could instead pay low taxes to live like emperors, like the Waltons or the Wexners quietly holding court on some massive compound in the middle of the country. Seems to indicate there are stronger sticking factors than the tax burden. All the more reason to discount those arguments and see them as they are: petty and even childish.
But that's the problem. "If you're so petty" smuggles the argument's conclusions into its axioms, and then "please take your ball and go home" doesn't (I think) align with your actual goals.
I guess I should explain it better than. Being that petty to me indicates this person is probably a psychopath, and will try and constantly stick their fingers into all sorts of things that work in favor of their own interests at the exclusion of my own and that of the rest of my countrymen. Having them remain would actually be quite damaging given the manipulation and influence their money can buy them coupled with their psychopathic mindset.
There's certainly a spectrum of this psychopathic billionaire tendency mindset. But there is a certain amount of disregard for your fellow man you have to maintain in order to even feel comfortable accepting that amount of compensation or personal profit making. I mean just think of the hubris alone of what accepting that package from a company you directly control really says. It's money that could buy more domain expertise, more actual talent that drives the business in whatever it is, but instead it goes to your pockets to buy what, your twenty third home? 65th car? Your 8th boat? I think the actions and scale really speak for themselves here.
What might you imagine my actual goals are? You think presence of a billionaire is required for them? I will answer this for you with a resounding "no."
This is purely the politics of envy and incredibly short sighted.
I'd suggest a quick review of the Laffer Curve and how capital flight has resulted in places reducing their tax take due to greed/communism/whatever.
If you want to pay more into inefficient bodies, you are free to do it but don't impoverish your nation with nonsense politics when less than 10% pay 75% of all tax.
Lets just let it go to the limits of the argument then. Why tax them at all right? Why have them pay a dime in taxes? They could get scared and shoo off like startled birds after all. Lets not let them pay a dime in taxes then. Free tax USA if you clear a billion dollars.
You have no problems with that proposal, right? Or, are you going to argue in favor of taxes? But, what if they leave?
I’m having a hard time understanding why you’re going so hard for the Laffer curve for your defence here. Like, a quick look at the Wikipedia page says that something along the lines of 70% is probably optimal for revenue generation, and I GUARANTEE you these billionaires aren’t paying anywhere close to that. So why not let’s move them significantly closer? If anything, the Laffer curve would tell us we SHOULD be significantly raising taxes on billionaires.
Exactly this. Europe is set up to benefit hereditary wealth (see NL wealth tax that can be avoided with planning not available to middle class) and who shows as up as eurocrats.
I actually support wealth taxes (say 0.5% like Swiss) but inherited wealth is a way bigger issue than generated wealth.
Looks like a lesson in how to play zero-sum games to lose.
The USA is better at playing the zero-sum game of where to begin a business. Zero-sum because many businesses are winner-takes-all and the country that business starts-up in is the one that wins.
Business founders are greedy (almost by definition), and a country needs to think what marginally motivates a founder to keep on going (or to founding 2nd/3rd business).
Hate Meta, or even hate Zuckerberg, but the USA is winning export earnings from the rest of the world because of Meta (and likewise other billionaire companies).
On the third foot, I'm guessing Zuckerberg has other motivations than more dollars?
The game isn't equitable, and the wealth disparity is heinous, and perhaps even the products are despicable. However everyone in the USA is living off the back of that wealth coming into the country.
It is really noticable in New Zealand where top marginal rate is 39% and GST (sales tax) is 15%. Why work an hour to bring in in a dollar to NZ when you get less than 50 cents (after all the other taxes). Our left parties want to tax wealth at 50%+ (if 2% wealth tax and drawdown of 4% ). Invisible inflation makes the taxation much much higher.
A wealth tax of 1% sounds trivial, but it isn't when compared to risk-free returns after drawdowns.
Unfortunately most voters are not founders, so they don't understand marginal motivation. And voters don't understand who brings money into the country. Voters just want increasing amounts of money spent, and politicians cater to them.
If anyone here is a game mechanics designer, what do you most notice about the motivation of taxing wealth?
You were making a good point until you compared tax in NZ to the USA. If you're making software eng type of salary you pay less effective tax in NZ compared to California ($200k in both). If you factor in health insurance it grows further. I know because I moved from NZ to CA then back again. I got paid more in CA, but my life wasn't materially better - I was able to save more in NZ.
If NZ really wanted to help startups they'd sort out the tax problems with options so that companies can actually interest people in taking risk by working for new businesses.
Personally, I think I'd be in favour of a wealth tax if I had the kind of wealth that could be taxed. I don't resent the tax I pay now.
Great Britain keeps saying the same thing when people make comparisons on who squandered the North Sea oil wealth and who didn’t. Big or small living within your means, saving and investing in infrastructure always works best in comparison to just funneling the money up to the gentry class. Gentry versus the mercantile class unfortunately for Britain, the gentry class won.
The British destroyed their industrial base from within not from taxes they just gave up in the face of competition and their three sibling countries Canada, Australia, and Zealand have been going down the same road until they got a recent wake up call, not in good way from Donald Trump of all people.
The absence of economic damage is not evidence of economic growth.
The author concludes that he found no significant negative effects from Norway’s wealth tax reforms. But I think he misses a more important question: Did the reforms contribute to economic growth?
If the economy isn't growing, that is a problem. And if a tax reform fails to improve growth, then the tax only increased government revenue. This might be good thing for goverment, but it bleeds enterpreneurs.
If there is no evidence of a positive contribution to economic growth, I wouldn't call it a successful growth reform.
Then, I think, wealthy people can take more risks. They have enough resources to start over if something does not work. Risk takers have their role in innovations for example.
For the angry people who want wealth distribution instead of viewing taxes as a benefit to the public and its services, what if every tax were not only for economic growth?
gaborcselle | 20 hours ago
usernomdeguerre | 19 hours ago
Naively, it felt like a lot of fluctuations and rubberbanding occurred right after Covid which wouldn't necessary make representative set.
erelong | 19 hours ago
scrtm | 19 hours ago
bpodgursky | 19 hours ago
Totally fair to claim this cannot scale to a "big" country, but it absolutely works to attract capital.
Spooky23 | 19 hours ago
Start with the startups, and move into the equity funds and family offices. Once you hit certain thresholds, you pay a 2.5% wealth tax or provide 1% equity, capped at 25%.
It’s totally legal now as the toadies on the Supreme Court have adopted an expansive interpretation of executive power.
dzink | 19 hours ago
WalterBright | 19 hours ago
asdfman123 | 19 hours ago
Now that they're doing their best to undermine American democracy, perhaps we should do more to encourage them to leave.
Muromec | 19 hours ago
a34729t | 18 hours ago
asdfman123 | 14 hours ago
He seems to have come to that conclusion, fwiw.
CamperBob2 | 4 hours ago
Who was complaining about that? Not me.
Danox | 14 hours ago
voidhorse | 19 hours ago
Humanity should not strive for kingship, whether minted through "god given right" or coin. We should strive for collective, distributive, balanced control of resources.
WalterBright | 19 hours ago
Or the 4,400 millionaires Musk created with the SpaceX IPO.
> We should strive for collective, distributive, balanced control of resources.
It's been tried many times. Doesn't work.
sho | 16 hours ago
It's hard to take anyone seriously when they make these kind of ludicrous, absolutist claims. Yes, it's been tried, and continues to be tried, by literally every country on earth, in various formulations. Maybe we haven't quite hit on the winning formula yet, but that's no reason to stop trying.
If you'd read any history, you'd know we'd tried pure unchecked capitalism without redistribution before, too. Late 17th century Britain comes to mind. I don't want to spoil the story too much, but it turns out that "doesn't work" either.
WalterBright | 5 hours ago
I have. Read up on the USSR, China, Vietnam, Cuba, Cambodia, etc., under communism. Nothing like that has occurred under capitalism. I suggest "The Black Book of Communism" for you. 100 million dead.
> it turns out that "doesn't work" either.
Google sez: "the standard of living for the laboring population in late 17th-century England generally rose"
moogly | 16 hours ago
If that's your best argument, billionaires are in trouble.
WalterBright | 5 hours ago
(And keep in mind that FSD cars are 8 times less likely to get in an accident.)
Billionaires get that way by making things and services that people want to buy.
asdff | 19 hours ago
cltby | 19 hours ago
abofh | 19 hours ago
Nobody is stealing from billionaires.
asdff | 18 hours ago
what | 18 hours ago
That’s not some “piss away” tax. Besides, who are you to say how much money is too much for someone to have?
asdff | 18 hours ago
You are right though, who am I to say who has too much money? I am only a wage slave. I don't know how to manage millions let alone billions like God Emperor Zuck. Maybe it would be better if he had even more of my money and more of yours as well. Better yet, lets wind down the state medicaid program and allow him to keep more money under his name. That money to treat my neighbors would be better spent on Musk buying back meta stock, or maybe an even larger boat. Let's wind it all down. Save money not having to print any dollars and just wire it to Zuck and Trump and Lutnick and friends.
CaptWorld | 19 hours ago
asdff | 18 hours ago
Be gone, bloodsuckers! I will seek employment at places of businesses that are not so foolish to waste so much money on a chief executive. And wouldn't you know, that is the vast bulk of them. The vast bulk of business owners and executives are not in fact billionaires. That represents a failing. Zuck took advantage of his legal rights to the company to enable that compensation. If the shareholders had better control of the shares with voting rights (zuck possesses super shares so that he cannot lose majority voting control) they would have never let that happen for zuck. He is as much a parasite to his own investors as he is to wider society. Greater even, as that is more directly their money that he is spending fueling up that boat.
CaptWorld | 17 hours ago
WalterBright | 17 hours ago
Fun story. Massachusetts decided they were going to go after wealthy people by taxing the sale of yachts built in the state. The wealthy simply bought yachts elsewhere, and many thousands of craftsmen were out of a job. The state rescinded the tax.
Epa095 | 16 hours ago
asdff | 16 hours ago
WalterBright | 5 hours ago
Like Jeff Bezos. And I personally know a couple wealthy people who moved there to avoid recent taxes. A real estate agent I talked to recently said that half her clients were selling their homes to move away from WA taxes.
asdff | 3 hours ago
WalterBright | 2 hours ago
Who are you gonna tax when they leave?
phs318u | an hour ago
WalterBright | 2 hours ago
asdff | 16 hours ago
By all means, let Zuck and Musk and their ilk become trillionaires. That's definitely going to make our lives better. It should trickle down after all. Waiting any day now.
CaptWorld | 10 hours ago
asdff | 3 hours ago
WalterBright | 17 hours ago
Have you ever paid Meta anything? Has Meta ever taken any money from you?
> He is as much a parasite to his own investors
None of his investors were unwilling. They can also pull out any time they want.
asdff | 16 hours ago
The irony of places like NYC and SF: so much need from education to sheltering and feeding homeless to building out transit or bettering healthcare outcomes. And yet, two hands raise in the air in a shrug, no money for it is the claim. But also yet, steps away from these problems in these two cities, mindbogglingly vast flows of money, the skim of which would solve all these problems occurring outside the doorways of these buildings.
A tough nut to crack I guess.
WalterBright | 5 hours ago
asdff | 3 hours ago
WalterBright | 2 hours ago
Or did you freely give it to him in exchange for a product?
hansvm | 18 hours ago
Take any non-billionaire and ask them if, given equal options A and B, they'd prefer to spend X% more on option B. They'll say "no." Billionaires aren't magically different. You'd do the same. This isn't people leaving because they're immoral.
I think recognizing that is important because, whatever your goals are, you likely won't reach them unless your actions correspond to reality. Put yourself in a departing billionaire's shoes for a moment. A country has put together enough political momentum and popular opinion to make taxing you in particular at a rate higher than your countrymen something viable and well supported. Does that sort of antagonistic climate sound like the home you want to spend your remaining years in? No, of course not. The only time I'm willing to not be the sort of "knob" who leaves that sort of nonsense is when I choose to be the kind of "knob" who fights back against such impropriety.
Are some, maybe most, of the departing billionaires selish, greedy, and maniacal? Sure, probably. Is the fact that they're leaving evidence of that? No, absolutely not.
Going back to my main point, that if your views don't line up with reality then you're likely to make or suggest the wrong courses of action, there are remarkably few worldviews I think are consistent with "we should selectively tax billionaires and everyone who disagrees can fuck off if they want to and we'll be better off therefore." Your statements seem reasonably aligned with <maximize some definition of happiness amongst non-billionaires> from a preferences standpoint, but even for that goal I don't think your proposed actions are close to correct. Other goals seem even less aligned.
asdff | 18 hours ago
No, they aren't like you or I at all. You'd actually probably loan me a buck if I asked you.
hansvm | 16 hours ago
Okay, great. What now? Your framing was that the sort of billionaire who wants to leave because of billionaire-specific tax hikes is not the sort of person you want in your country anyway.
(a) I still haven't seen any evidence that you think that leaving is itself evidence of any particular wrongdoing. Your argument is something along the lines of (i) billionaires are always bad, and (ii) they're so different/bad that attempting to apply a comparison to you or I is unfounded in the first place. That might all be true, but you could've dropped it into any discussion about billionaires. The discussion about wealth taxes is seemingly irrelevant to your argument and also to your point.
(b) The thing you said is that we don't want those people here anyway, so let them leave. That's not consistent with my attempt at an empathetic understanding of your viewpoint. I think you'd much rather they stay and contribute. If that's the case, tribal conversations about in groups and out groups aren't especially useful. As an example of something more productive, we could talk about how wealth taxes could include provisions for moving wealth out of a country (to mitigate the damage from 2nd-order effects of such legislation), how they could be more stringent about which people qualify (if you can "vacation" in a country 300 days per year and not pay a wealth tax, is that functionally different to a billionaire with a team of lawyers from the wealth tax not existing and the billionaire living without issue in the country in question?), etc.
For that matter, if the point is that they aren't like us at all and I can't generate anecdotes to relate to them (an idea I disagree with, but I'm rolling with it for the moment to see what happens), what's to say that things aren't similarly unfathomable regarding their philanthropy? You'd happily pay more taxes. What if those taxes are used to set the national guard on our own citizens and stifle their voting efforts? What if via your personal connections you can ensure instead that those funds actually go to feeding a poor person a hot meal?
On the one hand, I get it. I see rich people screwing us left and right, seemingly just because they don't even recognize that we're people too. On the other, they're also just people, with their own motivations, I want to be cautious overly maligning any individual because of a large fraction of bad actors, and I especially want to be cautious about distracting ourselves from our actual goals and the things which we can do to achieve them.
asdff | 15 hours ago
My argument is simple. If you are so petty over the prospect of a single digit percent tax on your billion of dollars of wealth so as to say "I will take my ball and go home and also publicly whine about taking my ball and going home," then please take your ball and go home. Let the more serious billionaires who aren't so petty stay behind and hopefully use their wealth to do something more productive than their current modus operandi of being a human version of Smaug laying on his horde.
By all means if they are that petty, I think they ought to leave and we'd be alright without them. I'm willing to bet most don't leave because in the case of the potential Californian wealth tax, California is already a high tax state. And yet, there they are, paying high taxes to live like mere kings in California, when they could instead pay low taxes to live like emperors, like the Waltons or the Wexners quietly holding court on some massive compound in the middle of the country. Seems to indicate there are stronger sticking factors than the tax burden. All the more reason to discount those arguments and see them as they are: petty and even childish.
hansvm | 15 hours ago
asdff | 15 hours ago
There's certainly a spectrum of this psychopathic billionaire tendency mindset. But there is a certain amount of disregard for your fellow man you have to maintain in order to even feel comfortable accepting that amount of compensation or personal profit making. I mean just think of the hubris alone of what accepting that package from a company you directly control really says. It's money that could buy more domain expertise, more actual talent that drives the business in whatever it is, but instead it goes to your pockets to buy what, your twenty third home? 65th car? Your 8th boat? I think the actions and scale really speak for themselves here.
What might you imagine my actual goals are? You think presence of a billionaire is required for them? I will answer this for you with a resounding "no."
hactually | 17 hours ago
I'd suggest a quick review of the Laffer Curve and how capital flight has resulted in places reducing their tax take due to greed/communism/whatever.
If you want to pay more into inefficient bodies, you are free to do it but don't impoverish your nation with nonsense politics when less than 10% pay 75% of all tax.
asdff | 16 hours ago
You have no problems with that proposal, right? Or, are you going to argue in favor of taxes? But, what if they leave?
hactually | 13 hours ago
The logical limit of your argument is communism and everyone with the ability to read a history book knows that results in corruption and death.
DanHulton | 7 hours ago
hactually | 2 hours ago
What's the plan?
Forced revaluation and selling of assets once per year?
Who values privately held assets?
asdff | 3 hours ago
Most people actually do have lived experience with communism, just that it's within the scope of their own family unit.
refurb | 19 hours ago
Europe could benefit a lot from breaking the stranglehold of old money.
a34729t | 18 hours ago
I actually support wealth taxes (say 0.5% like Swiss) but inherited wealth is a way bigger issue than generated wealth.
robocat | 19 hours ago
The USA is better at playing the zero-sum game of where to begin a business. Zero-sum because many businesses are winner-takes-all and the country that business starts-up in is the one that wins.
Business founders are greedy (almost by definition), and a country needs to think what marginally motivates a founder to keep on going (or to founding 2nd/3rd business).
Hate Meta, or even hate Zuckerberg, but the USA is winning export earnings from the rest of the world because of Meta (and likewise other billionaire companies).
On the third foot, I'm guessing Zuckerberg has other motivations than more dollars?
The game isn't equitable, and the wealth disparity is heinous, and perhaps even the products are despicable. However everyone in the USA is living off the back of that wealth coming into the country.
It is really noticable in New Zealand where top marginal rate is 39% and GST (sales tax) is 15%. Why work an hour to bring in in a dollar to NZ when you get less than 50 cents (after all the other taxes). Our left parties want to tax wealth at 50%+ (if 2% wealth tax and drawdown of 4% ). Invisible inflation makes the taxation much much higher.
A wealth tax of 1% sounds trivial, but it isn't when compared to risk-free returns after drawdowns.
Unfortunately most voters are not founders, so they don't understand marginal motivation. And voters don't understand who brings money into the country. Voters just want increasing amounts of money spent, and politicians cater to them.
If anyone here is a game mechanics designer, what do you most notice about the motivation of taxing wealth?
jemmyw | 16 hours ago
If NZ really wanted to help startups they'd sort out the tax problems with options so that companies can actually interest people in taking risk by working for new businesses.
Personally, I think I'd be in favour of a wealth tax if I had the kind of wealth that could be taxed. I don't resent the tax I pay now.
tlogan | 18 hours ago
So, in my opinion, we cannot reasonably extrapolate from policies implemented in Norway to predict whether they would work in California or the U.S.
Danox | 14 hours ago
The British destroyed their industrial base from within not from taxes they just gave up in the face of competition and their three sibling countries Canada, Australia, and Zealand have been going down the same road until they got a recent wake up call, not in good way from Donald Trump of all people.
a34729t | 18 hours ago
An oil scheikhdom is not the place to draw generalizations from when compared tk advanced industrialized countries.
nnurmanov | 4 hours ago
The author concludes that he found no significant negative effects from Norway’s wealth tax reforms. But I think he misses a more important question: Did the reforms contribute to economic growth?
If the economy isn't growing, that is a problem. And if a tax reform fails to improve growth, then the tax only increased government revenue. This might be good thing for goverment, but it bleeds enterpreneurs.
If there is no evidence of a positive contribution to economic growth, I wouldn't call it a successful growth reform.
Then, I think, wealthy people can take more risks. They have enough resources to start over if something does not work. Risk takers have their role in innovations for example.
Charly_HW | 3 hours ago