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.

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...

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.

Yeah, the billionaires pay people to write stuff like that. There's a reason the Forbes tagline was long "The Capitalist Tool."

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