Until April of this year, it was possible for a foreign national to be resident but not domiciled in the UK. Any income they earned in the UK would be subject to UK tax, but income earned abroad would not be. These non-domiciled foreign nationals could "live" in Dubai (or any other country) for tax purposes, but actually live in the UK in every practical sense.

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.

The same logic applies to California. I know a wealthy guy who would save a million a year in taxes by moving to Nevada or Washington state, but he just... hasn't. He's been talking about it for years, but no action. Because when it comes right down to it, it's too much disruption/change.

Yes it happens on the margin and once you have roots, it's unlikely you'll leave. But these kinds of things happen all at once and it's hard to reverse.

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

In theory, relatively poor people should be easy to coerce into different behaviours with taxes. In practice, that doesn't appear to be true. e.g. We've seen that carbon taxes on fuel don't really change vehicle purchases or behaviour at the pumps to a large degree unless the taxes are set very high.

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?

It also seems kind of short sighted to assume that there are no risks to having wealth in Dubai or citizenship there. I am not throwing shade at Dubai. The UK has been a peaceful prosperous place for over two hundred years. The future is unknown but I would assume Dubai carries some risk premium.

I remember reading Huey Long's book. The oil companies were threatening to leave Louisiana. He asked them "you going to take the oil with you?"

Right. We have some wealthy friends here in Norway who's also bemoaning the taxes and always bringing up moving someplace like Switzerland. Except it's never going to happen: in the kind of business they are (very mundane, not any kind of natsec) once you moved out you're an outsider.

Tax on businesses is separate from personal wealth and income taxes. You can run IKEA from Switzerland if you want, as long as ikea pays its taxes for each country it operates in. So billionaires can definitely shop for good deals on personal wealth, they can negotiate directly with Swiss Cantons about that.

It's the same thing with tiny tax cuts. No business person is saying, "I'd love to hire 30 more people to fulfil customer orders, but I need a 2% reduction in my top marginal income tax rate to be able to afford that!" No one pays wages out of their post-tax personal income. Either you have the incoming business to support hiring more people or you don't. If you do, then those wages and employee taxes go in your "costs" column and is a legit business expense you wouldn't pay taxes on.

Yes a tax environment can be oppressive and make hiring unattractive, but that's not what is relevant to those "cut taxes and I'll hire more people" debates. It's pure nonsense. A drop from 42% to 40% top marginal tax rate is not going to kick off a hiring boom.

>>where a few people throw up their hands and go "oh I've had enough".

Yes, it's called the Laffer Curve. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve

I have to ask, did you say the thing at the time the supposed exodus was getting lots of media coverage? I expressed skepticism about it at the time, although I did not pay it too much attention because I don't live int he UK. But any skepticism about such a prediction always incurs a bunch of people insisting I don't understand economics and explanation of how freely the wealthy can flee a high tax jurisdiction.

I notice you don't identify any particular investigative shortcomings or fallacies in the report; you just think it's absurd to even consider the viewpoint of an organization that argues the wealthy are undertaxed.

The article is basically worthless. Wealth follows a power law; saying 90x% of millionaires didn’t move is noise. The very wealthy are in fact moving; they don’t want to be subject to a tax jurisdiction that claims reach on global income. Now, they weren’t paying tax on that income before, so it’s not like it will make a huge impact on UK revenues, but I know that those folks tend to hire local professional services, bankers, etc; we’ll see if they keep doing business with the UK or look elsewhere, like the US. Smart money would be on the US + Dubai right now I think.

I'm also interested in how they've come up with the 3 million millionaires in the UK figure, they only seem to cite themselves for the data.

4.5% of the entire country are millionaires? On paper or in home equity + pension maybe... But those aren't the people we're concerned about leaving.

wait, you are deciding they are biased based on their name? Is that why it is in quotes? Or have you actually looked at their methods?

Asking because what you are doing is baselessly creating doubt in research, the same playbook first used by cigarette companies, later by oil and gas, and now by the entire right-wing movement to drive the anti-science agenda.

Yeah, if you care, go reproduce it yourself. Come back with data and your methods, or STFU.

See also: People that claim they will leave Country X if Person Y gets elected.

It does take a good deal of time. Another missed angle is how hard this group is to study: I imagine they never respond to surveys.

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.

It isn't hard to objectively gauge. The annual tax revenue shortfall is running at nearly £10bn this year, this is despite a high levels of earnings growth due to Labour agreeing to huge pay increases for the public sector.

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).

Not much in the way of details in your post. You're shutting down your business and moving for... reasons.

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.

https://jamesberrylaw.com/news-details/no-prison-for-debt

It shouldn’t surprise me that people are unfazed by the fact that the UAE is built on labor by indentured servants with few rights and is rife with human rights abuses, but I suppose being “business friendly” trumps all if your top priority is avoiding taxes and accumulating wealth.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002304z

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.

>I don't relish saying that, but the UK is not in a good place

And Dubai is?

The UK could be in a better position but it’s not in a bad place…

>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.

On the bright side, the weather in Dubai is much better than the UK's.

It's an interesting one because its relatively mild; we decamped _to_ Washington from Oregon (very partially) because the tax was so much more favorable in Washington.

(Washington tax here is cap gains at 7% which doesn't kick in until capital gains > 250k)

Bezos famously says that when the anecdotes conflict with the data, trust the anecdotes

well, and that its a stats heavy pre-made easy headline that doesn't take much to write.

In addition you can put any spin on it you like, to suit your agenda.

TrackerFF sounds like someone on the left trying to defend the wealth tax. As a Norwegian who believes in freedom and the right for anyone to start their own business, I think the wealth tax is one of the most toxic taxes ever introduced. In practice, it makes Norwegian-owned companies about 30% less competitive than foreign-owned ones.

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.

The threshold for Norway's wealth tax is having a total net worth around 150,000 euros, regardless of income. That should affect pretty much everyone who's owned a house for more than a decade.

If someone's aim is to avoid a wealth tax, then moving to Switzerland (one of the few other countries with a wealth tax) seems like a confusing choice. The Swiss wealth tax is payable in some cantons from ~50k Euros.

What a delightfully sane and refreshing response. It's nice to hear that places outside the US are capable of rational discourse. I'll go back to my burning dumpster fire now.

Oh, I remember the joy I felt when Phil Collins finally f'd off to Switzerland.

I can't wait for Ed Sheeran to follow him - clearly we need to more to make those pips squeak.

The media hysteria about a millionaire exodus happened in 2024, not 2025. 10900 articles were in 2024 not 2025 so the hysteria happened in 2024. The interesting part is: those spreading hysteria don’t need to provide evidence; they just simply repeat.

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.

The UK government defines wealthy as £2 million, or an income of £200k a year or more over three years.

But also your average UK home isn't worth $1 million.The average house is £269k, so a house worth a million dollars is worth 3 average houses.

Only sound comment here.

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".

That figure came from Swiss bank UBS, one of the reports that made the news making the claim that millionaires would leave if taxes were raised.

https://www.ft.com/content/a578561c-05de-402b-8ba7-91f2d77c5...

The boomers with million pound houses are all leeching pensions too. The society is disintegrating. The young are milked like tax livestock while they import millions of people.

If you are going to quote half the article (that I've just read) to make your point, I'm definitely not going to make it to the end of your comment.

I don't need to read it again, thank you.

It's absolutely true that we should consider the source for this and any other reviews / studies / news articles etc., and be aware of their likely position.

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.)

I’d react the same way as I would to an NRA gun violence study: can we verify the results?

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.

The review appears to be cited. If you suspect it, by all means, review it.

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.

You can pretty much be assured of bias if the word “justice” appears in the name of an organization or project or whatever. It has been co-opted all over, in settings where the word doesn’t really even make sense. After all, the only just and fair outcome would be if everyone paid the same amount.

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.

Perhaps rather than focusing on the speaker, you could focus on their arguments and tell us what's actually incorrect?

Did you critique the Henley report too?

It was written by one guy in South Africa who didn’t really do any valid research

DYOR guy on the internet tells me something is bullshit. That's settled then.

Fun fact: in France the median pensioner earns more than the median worker now

Or the actors signing a petition for Jimmy Kimmel. Okay, 300 rich actors are for him. Now how many want him off the air?

And yet none of the richer people I know have left[0], despite some of them making a lot of noise about it .

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

The criteria is someone with 1 million in liquid investable wealth - homes are not investable assets or liquid.

This is actually stated in the report xD

In the UK every 3rd older homeowner is essentially a millionaire

https://theferret.scot/27-per-cent-pensioners-millionaires-m...

Free speech is always the first victim of socialists.

> The one thing we need to clamp down is allowing people to avoid paying for the society that makes wealth possible.

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.

2 comes up in Australia a lot in regards to levying taxes on the resource sector, whose business model is digging up bits of Australia and selling it overseas.

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.

> 1.

The correct way to handle that is a Land Value Tax but nobody is ready for that conversation.

>>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. Imagine I own property in country A and conduct most of my business and own most of my assets in country B. Why should A have a claim to my world wide income and not B? What about a situation when I conduct my business in 20 different countries. Why should country A get the claim for my income?

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 rub here is the definition of rich.

Always has been