From a quick search:
>> Patriotic Millionaires UK is a nonpartisan network of wealthy individuals in the UK who publicly advocate for higher taxes on the rich and progressive economic reform.
>> Tax Justice UK is a non-profit, politically non-aligned campaigning and advocacy organization working to ensure that everyone benefits from a fair and effective tax system. The group focuses on building a movement for progressive tax reform, pushing for policies that tax wealth and excessive corporate profits at higher rates in order to better fund public services and redistribute wealth
I'm sorry but if someone posts a study conducted by NRA on gun violence, most would view it with suspicion. I think we should probably view this study with suspicion as well given the groups that were conducting it.
We should also recognize that, for all but the most mainstream possible questions or topics, most of the study is going to come from interest groups-- they're the ones who are interested enough to do the work to look at the data and publish their results!
If we dismiss reviews like this out-of-hand simply because they are created by an interest group, then we'll miss out on a lot of information and opportunity for reasonable discourse.
(Note that I'm not saying the parent comment is advocating this, but it did raise the point in my mind.)
A peer reviewed study, with published data and methodology. (it might even be accurate, unless you're a sociologist)
then there is a "study" created by a think tank, PR firm pretending to be a think tank, or a dipshit company pushing something or other.
The latter a good for seeing which rich prick, or group of pricks has the time and money to push a specific agenda. and not much else.
Speaking of - why don’t government services just charge transparent rates for the services they’re providing like any business? Everyone else figures out how to charge for a product or service. A lot of waste is normalized and hidden in the vague sums thrown at agencies, with no competition to drive prices down since it’s a government service. Taxpayers could get better outcomes by pushing for better governance instead of more unjust redistribution continually.
Donald Trump is already president of the US. You are not going to beat him at the "stupid questions about the government" game, so I would just sit back and let him show you how it's done.
Also, the NRA has a long history of suppressing gun violence research in general (through their lobbying efforts of the CDC and NIH, the Dickey Amendment, etc.). This would contribute more to suspicion than anything else.
In this instance there are copious footnotes and citations of data backing up the argument. If they’re falsified, yes, we should disregard the study. But they don’t seem to be.
It was written by one guy in South Africa who didn’t really do any valid research
So whatever exodus occurs will be on the margin, where a few people throw up their hands and go "oh I've had enough".
At the same time, you have plenty of things tying people down: friends and family, business opportunities, kids in school.
Of course, there are lots of other reasons why out-of-staters might choose to move to MA.
NY sources taxes to the employer's office location in NY if a worker works remotely under certain circumstances, for example [1]. If geography can be used to shift or avoid tax exposure to income, I see no problem with using the law to prevent that, depending on the target outcome. My global income is subject to US federal taxes, regardless of my residency (although foreign exclusions apply under a reasonable income threshold, ~$120k/year, under the assumption I am paying taxes where I reside outside the US) [2].
[1] https://www.anchin.com/articles/remote-workers-and-the-conve...
[2] https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/fore...
I'm not sure how you reasonably allocate state/local taxes other than by physical presence. Any reasonably large company has an economic nexus in many states and even countries.
I wouldn’t call moving to another place to pay less in taxes a virtue.
Are you talking about the very generous pensions for government officials?
If you have say 4 million USD and invest in stocks expecting say 7% per year you will pay 103k USD in cap gain tax and then 44k in wealth tax for a grand total of almost 150k/year.
That's enough to fund Switzerland lifestyle let alone life in multiple other countries that levy 0 or close to 0 cap gain tax for long term gains. It's difference between comfortable retirement and having to work.
Maybe it doesn't make much difference if you're very wealthy but for those who just managed to get financial independence it's huge.
I've come to realize the answer is nearly always NO. They want (and believe they need) more.
Which according to economists is the wrong way around: it's better to have taxes on land (because it doesn't discourage land existing - land is fixed) than to have taxes on work income (which on the margin, discourages working)
Anyone, residential or commercial, with a mortgage would simultaneously find a massive amount of their net value erased while stuck with huge monthly payments on top of massively increased tax bills, unable to sell assuming the higher taxes drive down property prices.
Land is worth money because of improvements or detrimental choices. Manhattan and Staten Island have dramatically different valuations because of what’s there.
California needs a sane taxation system that doesn’t allow squatters to pay nothing for property taxes, but harshly punishes new homeowners.
He could move and supposedly save money (no income tax in WA, but there are some Capital Gains taxes).
The people who actually act on this stuff are usually not really wealthy, mostly just retirees finding themselves with a windfall of time and cash, who usually don’t math well.
If you look at Detroit which was a manufacturing hub for a long time, it would be difficult to imagine a world in which they were irrelevant. All these people built lives there and there was all this specialization and industry there. And it worked well until it didn't.
Once a place loses its dynamism and people have had enough, it'll be very hard to get them back
Note also that while the factories moved to China, the wealthy stayed right here in the US, & didn't go where their money was spent.
Different scale, different consequences.
It shouldn't surprise anyone that wealthier folk aren't moving to different countries over a tax that is smaller to them, in relative terms, than carbon taxes are to the poor. What is money for, after all, if not to enable you to live the life you want to live? If you need to move to Dubai to avoid taxes, how can you consider yourself wealthy?
The removal of this non-domiciled status is clearly far more significant than a normal tax increase. The UK was a uniquely attractive destination for the super-rich, because they could enjoy all the amenities of living in London with no real concerns about the tax implications. It is plausible that many of those people will decide to pay UK tax rather than move abroad, but we are talking about an exceptionally highly-mobile group who have already made the decision to move country, many primarily or solely for tax reasons.
indeed thats why to have accountants and lawyers, the issue here is that non-dom meant that you could avoid paying tax on stuff you earnt outside of the UK. for example if you have a lot of income being generated in the USA, then being a non-dom meant that you could avoid paying tax here in the UK at the same time.
For US citizens its a bit harder, as you're liable for tax on all income, regardless of source. I'm not sure how they get round that, debt financing or something similar I imagine
I, as a rich techbro, but not an Uber rich techbro, have to pay ~46% of my income in tax. (even though the majority comes from the US in USD) Don't get me wrong, I earn a fucking kings ransom, and I don't mind paying that amount of tax.
but. If I was earning maybe 4x that amount, I could probably avoid a whole bunch of tax. It doesn't seem correct that the richer you get, the more optional tax is.
In the US many people falsely believe illegal immigrants do exactly that, and that lie has contributed to a lot of outrage, so obviously people perceive the system you're proposing as unjust.
The first is paying your fair share of taxes for enabling the system of rule of law, financial protection, courts, stability provided by national defense, etc. that help you earn that money in the first place. This argues for paying taxes in the country where the money is earned.
The second is the principle of progressive taxation that funds the entire social system where you live -- roads, schools, parks, police, health care, retirement. The richer you are, the higher the rate you can and should give back. Thus it doesn't matter whether you make your money at home or abroad -- it counts toward the taxes you're morally obligated to pay for where you reside and/or are a citizen of.
Because these conflict, the US allows for Americans to let taxes paid abroad count against their US taxes, so they're not double-taxed. Which is one form of a reasonable compromise. There are many other forms you could imagine.
In any case the super-rich are only taxed on income they take out of their businesses. That also limits the benefits of both attracting them, and of exempting them.
I do not see any evidence that there was a net benefit from this exemption.
Boo hoo, let them move to some remote tax haven then, and live there next to their money and incorporation documents.
Yes, it's called the Laffer Curve. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve
Not to excuse Labour's part in this, but this is a side effect of most news outlets being consolidated and owned by relatively few rich people.
In addition you can put any spin on it you like, to suit your agenda.
1. Physical assets, particularly real estate, can't leave. You can't pick up parts of Manhattan and move them elsewhere. Likewise, resource assets like mines, farms and oil wells can't move either; and
2. As long as there's profit to be made, companies won't leave regardless of tax rates. This one comes up a lot with the rent-seeking pharma companies in the US who will sell something here for $1000 but sell it in France for $10. What you have to remember is that if selling for $10 in France wasn't profitable, they wouldn't do it.
The one thing we need to clamp down is allowing people to avoid paying for the society that makes wealth possible. Want to own property in the US? Great. Your worldwide income is now taxable. Want to avoid tax by transferring your "IP" to an Irish subsidiary and then paying royalty payments? Yeah, let's stop that.
We need to stop people getting the benefits of owning assets in a society while avoiding all the obligations.
Any/all attempts to levy more taxes on their vast profits are met with claims that they’ll just pack up and leave, even though the activity would still be profitable.
It never really made sense, but they always manage to drum up enough fear to scupper any plans.
How does society make this wealth possible? Things like roads or schooling or electricity are deserving of a fee for the service provided. Not a perpetual share of your wealth. Imagine if every business you purchase from did the same thing. It doesn’t make sense.
As an example, nothing SF does (as a government) causes it to be a good place to build companies. That’s just network effects between VCs and founders and others. If the ecosystem were elsewhere it would still function just as well.
You're kidding right? A stable society is necessary for wealth to exist. A lot goes into creating a stable society. Education, law and order, roads, access to food and drinking water, affordable shelter and giving people hope for their futures.
War and revolution are the ultimate forms of wealth redistribution. It's why the descendants of the descendants of monarchs and wealthy families don't control all the wealth today.
Leftists (of which I include myself) are demonized by neofeudal serfs who have replaced Catholicism with Capitalism but all we're trying to do is avoid the outcome we're hurtling towards where the heads of the wealthy end up on spikes outside the city walls and we have land reforms.
Unfortunately, you are not going to reach this kind of "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" with logic.
These people think that "wealth" is some kind of magical golden poop that millionaires produce every day from their golden toilets, for the betterment of society. "trickle down" economics I believe they call it.
How do you even begin to talk to someone like that?
You should take your revolutionary business ideas and make a business with them.
Anyway, I'm gonna go pay my power bill.
The correct way to handle that is a Land Value Tax but nobody is ready for that conversation.
The way to make it sane is to tax local assets, local consumption and doing business at specific location (IP protection revenue based taxes for example). If you attempt to tax world wide assets you will always get a situation when people choose another country to tax them. You can't claim it's exactly your country that deserves all the tax.
> The Tax Justice Network’s review – co-published with Patriotic Millionaires UK and Tax Justice UK – of the Henley report finds that the number of millionaires claimed by Henley & Partners to be leaving countries in “exodus” in 2024 represented near-0% of those countries’ millionaire populations. For example, the 9500 millionaires widely reported to be leaving the UK in 2024 represented 0.3% of the UK’s 3.06 million millionaires.
#1: The data is completely arbitrary, incorrectly compared, and adds no new insights.
The tax changes, AFAIK, are specifically aimed at generating more tax revenue from the foreign millionaires who have been using the UK's non-dom tax advantages, by getting rid of that status.
The counter rhetoric was "if even a fraction of those millionaires leave, the UK will actually lose tax revenue instead."
This article does not report on any actual adjusted numbers to the 9500 millionaires reported leaving, it just says "guys we have a lot more millionaires" — vast majority of whom are not foreign / dom-status, and therefore will not be affected anyways. No new tax revenue from them by eliminating non-dom status. It's apples-to-oranges.
Basically, they're not even using the correct denominator (foreign millionaires).
#2: This was written by an organization seeking to end tax havens, which doesn't really acknowledge that, while calling out the bias of the original report by the organization that helps secure golden visas.
#3: "credited for the UK Labour government’s decision to weaken tax reforms" — it sounds like the original government decision wasn't even passed, though I'm not sure about this, it would mean that you can't say "X didn't cause Y as was predicted" when X didn't actually occur in full.
I don't need to read it again, thank you.
They're using the wrong denominator, comparing apples-to-oranges. They aren't actually revealing that an exodus didn't occur, they aren't debating any numbers or adding any new data.
I added context for people who aren't familiar with the UK non-dom status, or the original intention of the legislation.
They're also a very biased organization, same as the organization behind the original report apparently.
You can usually tell message board prevalent politics by seeing which stuff gets demands for rigor and which stuff is accepted as-is.
It's a progressive organization releasing a "study".
So the first report said people with liquid money chose to move it out of the UK. This report says actually anyone with a largish paid off house in a good area should be counted, and as they didn't sell their house and move, there's no problem.
I appreciate that they point out the biases of the first article, but I still find the 'liquid millionaire' a more interesting stat. The Times also reported that the UK collected less tax revenue after trying to tax the ultra rich more [0][1].
So at the moment I'd say both people are stating their side too strongly and the truth is maybe somewhere in the middle but I'm still leaning towards 'rich people are leaving the UK if they can' based on what I've read.
[0] https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/capital-gains-t... [1] https://archive.ph/qXcUc
Then those locked into the X-rinse-and-repeat-loop echo the same hysteria, as if they’ve just discovered some kind of wisdom when they have simply been overtrained.
I think this study is a bit misleading. If the UK truly has 3M millionaires I strongly suspect a large majority of them are regular people with OK jobs that are “millionaires” by virtue of owning a house and having retirement savings. The vast majority of these people are likely making decent but not remarkable incomes and likely can’t afford to relocate to another country. Without breaking this down into income groups, this article seems fairly misleading. But that’s par for the course I guess, since media and politicians a) frequently conflate wealth with income and b) are counting on people thinking a net worth of a million (dollars|pounds) makes a person “rich.”
https://theferret.scot/27-per-cent-pensioners-millionaires-m...
This is actually stated in the report xD
Turns out, of course, that some of the rich folks that did move to Switzerland, were funding PR and social media campaigns on this topic.
It was so omnipresent, that even high school kids had "wealth tax" as one of their most important topics.
EDIT: Personally, I think their strategy kind of backfired. There was just too much talk about wealth tax, which doesn't seriously affect too many here. They did try to angle it as "If all the billionaires leave, who's gonna create jobs for the rest?" - but it still didn't resonate too much with the average citizen.
edit: it does appear that 150,000 is correct, but it is an additional 0.1% tax on wealth above 150,000 euros.
Still basically nothing for the overwhelming majority of people. An additional $1,000 a year for every $1,000,000 you are worth.
Some municipalities also have a separate property tax which iirc is usually an order of magnitude lower than the wealth tax.
If you've owned a house for a decade you typically have like 15 or 20 years left on your mortgage and are in debt. The tax worth of the house is some fraction of the sale price, so for a house that one might sell today for €500k the tax value could be like €50k. At the same time, typical debt after only ten years is probably almost half the house price (assuming you had some savings before buying the house). And with debt, that's what your earnings go to... I as an above-median earning Norwegian with house (and thus very negative worth) will probably have decades before getting anywhere near the threshold. And even then you only pay for what's over the threshold, so if you're At the threshold you pay nothing.
I can't wait for Ed Sheeran to follow him - clearly we need to more to make those pips squeak.
It’s sold as a “tax on the rich,” but in reality it’s a 2.1% annual tax on businesses. The companies have to cover these costs, and the result is that everyone — rich or poor — ends up paying for it. The only winner here is the state, which wastes the money on useless projects and subsidies.
It gets even dumber: businesses that invest in emergency preparedness — like storing gravel or materials for war or disaster scenarios — actually get punished by the wealth tax. Imagine paying 2.1% tax every year on a gravel pile. No, this is not a joke: link: https://www.dn.no/innlegg/beredskap/sikkerhetspolitikk/formu...
The consequences are clear: more than half of the 400 wealthiest people in Norway have already left the country. There’s no risk capital left for startups, and outside the oil and gas sector, businesses are struggling. Plenty of smart young engineers fresh out of university can’t find work, and hiring of junior software developers has basically stopped.
When we talk about taxes, we should be talking about incentives and motivation. If you tax people so hard that they lose the drive to work and create, then you’ve got a real problem.
If I had the chance, I’d move to Sweden or Switzerland immediately. But I can’t, because I’ve got a family to take care of here.
"Frances riches man opposes new tax".
Response: "Ok that's one vote against. Now how many for the new tax?"
Dan Neidle[1] and the FT[2] have already done much better debunking of it, although that doesn't mean there isn't truth to it, just that Henley and Partners's report doesn't prove anything.
Chris Giles at the FT did a good summary[3]
[1] https://taxpolicy.org.uk/2025/07/27/henley-partners-milliona... [2] https://www.ft.com/content/28ebf57d-af22-48a0-91b9-880e3f1fb... https://archive.is/w6New [3] https://www.ft.com/content/0a24be5e-395e-43db-a91f-4b4f02d99... https://archive.is/Le05V
Wait, no. The exact opposite is happening. My bad, it's easy to get confused.
Personally I would ban unattributed PR. If Larry Ellison want to buy a thousand billboard and write: "Don't taxe me or I will leave. I am Larry and endorse this message" that's ok.
But if he use a PR firm to shift the public opinion with unattributed advertisement and paid-for journal articles that should not be acceptable.
Alas the US Supreme Court decied otherwise in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission...
Oh and three, for all the warnings and blackmailing, as the studies show, they never actually go through with their threats. MACO - Millionaires Always Chicken Out? /s
How many of those people actually follow through and do X is a very different question.
https://www.ft.com/content/a578561c-05de-402b-8ba7-91f2d77c5...
'Tax justice' is a political group. Just stop citing such drivel as almost mathematical fact.
The Henley data was poor, but this criticism was too. I don't think we have the data and I fear the Henley data actually underestimates the reality.
FWIW, anecdotally my peers with the means are all looking at leaving and some have gone. I've closed down my business, my wife is looking at keeping hers running remotely because of the staff in it.
And I'm typing this from a Dubai hotel room while I spend a couple of months seeing if I can set something new up that I can do from here. I don't relish saying that, but the UK is not in a good place and there's no light at the end of the tunnel.
It boggles my mind that any westerner would choose to live and work in Dubai. Their laws and rules are very different from ours.
I do see that they have made some steps toward reform of their debtors prisons. I'm very glad to see that, but I still do not consider Dubai to be a safe place to even visit, let alone live there.
As long as you're not borrowing money from local entities, you're almost certainly not going to run into any trouble like that in Dubai. In practice Dubai is more libertarian than the UK; the government generally doesn't bother you or care what you're doing, as long as you don't get on the bad side of someone well-connected.
> as long as you don't get on the bad side of someone well-connected.
Thats a huge fucking caveat. given that the law is very much stacked in the favour of citizens, then if you do get into trouble, you're in deep shit fast.
Even for women?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_the_United_Arab_Emira...
Dubai is a bit of a trigger for some people. Others I know are going/gone to Portugal, Malta, Cyprus, the US, Aus, Can, NZ, Singapore, France. Your mileage may vary - people leaving can generally give you similar lists of why, but where they go seems varied.
I used to live in Saudi for a time (25+ years ago), and actually really liked much about it then and it had changed markedly when I've been back more recently. I've visited Iraq, I've been detained in Oman under suspicion of espionage and still see virtues in the place. Dubai is positively liberal by comparison and becoming more liberal, while the UK is becoming more authoritarian and despite the official crime statistics, I'm not sure it's as safe as it once was.
On the bright side, the weather in Dubai is much better than the UK's.
Looks unhealthy unless one has air conditioning a lot of the year.
this goes over the data. But in short its super patchy, based on a very small dataset, and a whole lot of vibes.
> UK is not in a good place
That may be, but dubai is basically farage's wet dream.
The only ones that haven’t moved, are those who are considering it, can’t move cause their business is dependant on the UK, or their family/kids need them in the UK.
If your income doesn’t require you to stay in the UK, why would you stay there?
Sometimes an anecdote is just an anecdote I guess.
[0] or at least haven't spent any less time in the UK, and are still resident, as some already spend a lot of time in a number of different countries
From what I know from a friend in that type of group London is no longer the place to park money. Not sure where it’s switched to.
There is an obsession on the left in the UK with the media being allowed to publish things that, as of the last election, disagree with the government narrative. Part of this is the construction of narratives that will focus on specific pieces of information that are misleading, as evidence that all associated claims are wrong.
This happens so consistently and often on almost every issue.
The UK has economic problems, lobbying groups have significant power in the UK, this lobbyist is part of the group saying that taxes aren't high enough and that if we just tax more then we will become a wealthy nation, they have been saying this since they were founded, tax revenue has gone up a lot and they are still saying it (because, as ever, it just hasn't been tried the right way).
To cut through the nonsense: we are taxing more and it doesn't appear to be working, tax revenue has gone up significantly over the past five years and we got poorer, the political requirement for more tax revenue is significantly outpacing the ability of the few paying tax to earn those amounts (there is a £50bn "black hole"...not deficit, just the shortfall that has opened up in the past year or so caused by the weak economy...senior Labour MPs/ministers are still pushing for welfare spending to increase significantly), and there is no limitless source of money that can be endlessly extracted from to generate revenue...we know this because the UK has devolved governments with higher income tax rates, these rates raise less revenue not more.
Btw, I will also add a general point that isn't acknowledged as a unfortunate result of recent events: the massive shortfall is based on numbers that are wildly optimistic. OBR growth forecasts were much higher than the market after Labour's election, they made no sense. OBR often produces numbers that are very helpful for the incumbent government, they did this for the Tories. Unsurprisingly, the OBR is now slashing forecasts and it is all going wrong...but this was all predictable from the start, it isn't hard, it is very obvious, it just requires being able to separate reality from motivated thinking (i.e. impossible for most people, let alone politicians who are simian in their capacity to see reality). The OP talks about the media...almost no-one covered these crooked numbers, no-one is covering it now, no-one will cover it because it disagrees with the political narrative of the "right-wing" media.
None of this is hard to objectively gauge, it is very easy to gauge because you just talk to people and look at the incentives they face. Labour and their associated lobbyists do not live on the same planet as normal people, they should not be taken as evidence of any kind of reality (lobbyists generally...you would think this would be obvious but politics is so embedded in life in the UK that they are the main source of reality).
The tax was targeted at Jeff Bezos, but he decamped to Florida just before it went into effect.
josefritzishere•1h ago
supportengineer•1h ago
fooster•1h ago
SilverElfin•1h ago
xienze•1h ago
Sort of, but it goes back to the overwhelming size of government budgets. In the US for example, even if all of the assets of the wealthiest individuals could be converted 1:1 into cash (it can’t) and the government took 100% of it, congratulations, we’ve fully funded the government for perhaps one year. There’s nowhere to go at that point except to revise the definition of “rich.”