The "but the millionaires will leave" trope is just propaganda to justify massive wealth transfers from the poor to the already rich. There are two big reasons why this isn't true:

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.

> 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.

Trying to convince rich people that their extreme selfishness leads to externalities like unnecessary suffering of others and destruction of the planet is like trying convince a cult member that they're happy, secure, and not abused. Good luck with that because trickle-down economics, unregulated capitalism, and "family values" nationalism are the ones who have more power here and in the world. It doesn't have to be this way if there were greater solidarity, (rational/productive) action, and civic participation amongst non-capital owners to limit the power of a small cadre of destructive individuals who horde wealth, but great numbers of people choose head in the sand learned helplessness or inaction, foolishly believing their interests align with the very rich, accelerationist terrorism, or ineffective shouting into the void like this here. :) Revolutionary communism, anarchocapitalism, nor any utopia ain't the way but certainly maximum corruption like gold bars, dark pools of PAC money, getting away with accepting $50k bribes, or using office to launch a crypto coin ain't sustainable.