Not quite. If you are ultra wealthy because you happen to own several large buildings, fleeing the country to avoid taxes is easy. Doing so with you wealth, however, isn’t.
Which is why they will leave with mobile wealth before the act goes into effect, taking away the capital workers use to earn a living. Property taxes on land and fixed structures work well as they cant run away in a practical way.
The means of production is still here, what’s left of it. Lower asset prices will benefit the poor. What should have happened during COVID is the government took a percentage of businesses to the cost of lockdown/furlough (if they were of a certain size) rather than subsidising the asset hoarding class at the expense of workers. Then you give the workers part of these businesses, spend the rest on re-industrialising. It would have caused the biggest economic boom in the UK maybe ever and with all these consumers available to buy things you’d get a lot of investment and some people would use some of this wealth (£1tn in the UK alone, about £15k for every adult and child in the UK) to start small businesses creating an even better economy.
It’s got to be worth a try rather than the disastrous economic policies that got us here.
The US already claims tax dominion (for its citizens) over the whole world. You get the foreign earned income exclusion, and you can also avoid double taxation in many countries that have a tax treaty with the US, but otherwise the default is that you need to report and pay income tax on worldwide income, no matter the source and no matter where you are a resident.
In the same vein, if the US were to implement a wealth tax, the simplest way in terms of enforcement and not creating perverse incentives to shelter wealth outside the country would be to make it international in scope. Yes, people could give up their citizenship, but that's a huge sacrifice which most wealthy people would not want to make at any price, and there's already an exit tax in place for people that do this.
Not totally. The wealthy are incredibly heavily invested in our economy. Take Elon Musk for example. He’s heavily invested in SpaceX, Tesla, and Twitter. If he walks away from the US, Tesla, Twitter, and SpaceX are all still here and can’t easily “run away”. Sure, they can take some “mobile wealth”, but if you are very wealthy you can’t just leave a whole economy (that’s where your wealth is).
> He’s heavily invested in SpaceX, Tesla, and Twitter.
You make it sound as though he put a lot of his own money (somehow obtained from elsewhere) into these companies.
But that's not true at all. It is correct English to say that he is "heavily invested" in these companies in the sense that his wealth is paper wealth based on the perceived value (stock price) of these companies.
But he is not invested in them the way that a typical person has their retirement funds invested in a company or mutual fund.
Elon came here under a similar story. The party in significant power cheers on 'kill the boer [farmer]' ( and 'redistribute' their capital to the poor). He escaped to here. It's admirable he wants to prevent America becoming like South Africa.
The problem with that politics is stagnation. It is hard to move SpaceX and Tesla out of the country, but you don't get new companies in this situations, there will be less competition and, as a consequence, Elon Musk get more power, and there is nothing you could do about this.
Not quite. If you are ultra wealthy because you happen to own several large buildings, fleeing the country to avoid taxes is easy. Doing so with you wealth, however, isn’t.