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[+] -4 points 5 months ago (20 children)
  • [–] 19 points 5 months ago* (2 children)

    Capital flight is a myth. Wealthy people do business in liberal cities because that's where all the talent is. Liberal cities are where all the talent is because those places use taxes to improve the quality of life. Wealthy businesses do not attract talented workers; talented workers atteact wealthy businesses.

    When NY fought against Amazon getting a sweetheart deal to build a warehouse, bootlickers came out of the woodwork to claim it was a great idea. That NY needed to offer Amazon tax breaks and grants because it would create jobs.

    Progressives told Amazon to eat shit. Amazon has continued to beg to be allowed to do business in NY. They are negotiating with the current mayor Mamdani because it's fuckin NYC, of course they wanna do business there.

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  • [–] 16 points 5 months ago*

    What I do not understand is what we should be scared of? If the ones who are not paying taxes flee, what are we losing? I see this all the time that "well if I payed less taxes I would work more" which is pointless from a state perspective since there is no increase in income.

    Some people seem to live under the delusion that billionaires carry with them economic growth when they are hoarders of capital. A healthy economy should have a high turnover of capital which can only feasibly happen if the middle class is large. That the size of the middle class is shrinking is not due to the poor, ergo...

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  • [–] 12 points 5 months ago (10 children)

    If they arent contributing to begin with why would them leaving be an issue? They're parasites that keep taking but don't give back whatsoever.

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  • [+] -15 points 5 months ago (10 children)
  • [–] 9 points 5 months ago* (9 children)

    Because the Texas and Florida governments are filled with bootlickers who would rather enrich themselves than do right by their constituency.

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  • [+] -10 points 5 months ago (9 children)
  • [–] 7 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (3 children)

    Then they can fuck off to somewhere else, like maybe a visit to Titanic.

    Billionaires are inherently destabilizing to society. We'd be better off even if we took their money and just burned it in a big bonfire, because they wouldn't be funding the reactionary fascist trash like the dickheads currently running our State.

    They didn't earn that money, they exploited people for it. Redistributing it is the nice option. I'm sure not going to lick their boots and beg them to come exploit my State harder; it's pathetic.

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  • [+] -7 points 5 months ago (3 children)
  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago* (2 children)

    They're antisocial leeches, and they suck everything good out of the community. They horde wealth so that they can do whatever they want. They're the worst people on earth, I don't want them in my country.

    It's so pathetic when people lick their boots like we need them more than they need us. They violated the social contract; they should consider themselves lucky that we don't take all of their ill-gotten gains from them. They're fuckin' pirates, and not the cool kind.

    Musk and Zuckerberg exploited a lot of people for that money. They didn't earn it.

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  • [+] -7 points 5 months ago (2 children)
  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    They built their fortune on exploitation and amoral pursuit of money and power with reckless disregard for everything besides their own influence. Your Nazi saluting hero should be locked up for what he did with DOGE. Zuckerberg facilitated a genocide in Myanmar because he didn't give a shit about anything besides his wealth.

    And here you are licking their boots. It's disgusting.

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago* (3 children)

    I don’t get how you poors don’t understand that money is a zero sum game. Allowing one person to acquire all the resources leaves less for everyone else. It makes it harder to open up businesses. It’s stealing your American dream one rari at a time

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  • [+] -5 points 5 months ago (3 children)
  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    And if that money were elsewhere, would that mean that more, less or the same number of people would be employed? And would the political system be more or less stable?

    Because right now, you're looking at one side of an equation but not the other.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago

    Exactly… a public company. So you can actually go look up how Megger your wages are compared to the profit. You can see how predatory the financial structure of the company is. You can also directly see that it is a black hole for And has returned very little to society compared to the amount of money that has gone in.

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  • [–] 7 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    I applaud the high quality references, but the wealth taxes studied by Econ are often not the wealth taxes that are in popular discourse.

    In particular, the general public, and the few inequality economists like Piketty, Saez, and Zucman, advocate for a billionaires wealth tax. Due to the lack of any sort of data on this, the broader economics profession generally only studies the effects of wealth taxes in the top bracket, which targets the wealthy, but not the ultra wealthy.

    The NBER paper you cited is particularly egregious. The claim that a one percentage point increase in the top wealth tax rate leads to capital flight is arguably misleading because Sweden and Denmark have infamously flat taxes (contrary to popular belief). Their top wealth tax applied to singles/couples with a wealth exceeding 1500K/3000K, or about 150K/300K USD.

    That is... not very wealthy, and if anything only middle/upper middle class. Not at all what a billionaires tax would target.

    The broader evidence is that Sweden has exhibited a serious backsliding in its inequality measures, and the collapse of its welfare state after abolishing wealth taxes.

    ‘We got lazy and complacent’: Swedish pensioners explain how abolishing the wealth tax changed their country - https://theconversation.com/we-got-lazy-and-complacent-swedish-pensioners-explain-how-abolishing-the-wealth-tax-changed-their-country-272041

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  • [+] -3 points 5 months ago (2 children)
  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    Because wealth rapidly becomes illiquid as it increases in value. The capital of the ultra wealthy is intimately tied to physical assets in the real world that makes it difficult for capital flight to occur. They are wealthy because they own the supermarkets, the hospitals, and physical infrastructure.

    An example of this is when the UK froze/seized Russian billionaire Abramovich's assets as part of sanctions, which included the Chelsea Football club. Abramovich (and the media) made a big stink about it, but was ultimately forced to sell.

    The case for keeping the ultra wealthy around for their entrepeneurial innovation is inconsistent with broader economic evidence. Bell et al 2019 (QJE) show that although it is true that the young of the top 1% (again, not the ultra wealthy) are 10x more likely to become inventors, the actual causal mechanism is exposure effects, i.e. having strong peer networks.

    This is something that is explicitly worsened by abolishing wealth taxes, which are well documented to increase wealth concentration and social mobility.

    Who Becomes an Inventor in America? The Importance of Exposure to Innovation* | The Quarterly Journal of Economics | Oxford Academic - https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/134/2/647/5218522

    I suggest you read Zucman's common wealth tax objections, which addresses most common rebuttals.

    https://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/saez-zucman-wealthtaxobjections.pdf

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