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Comment by dforrestwilson | Hacker News Reader

I don't agree with everything he says, but he makes a compelling point that the rich will simply leave if taxes are raised too much.

I'm not sure what the solution is, but travel is one aspect of globalization that seems to benefit the rich more than the poor.

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The article makes the point that even if the rich don't leave, or avoid their taxes in some other way, high taxes on the rich disincentivize creating wealth. That's likely to have a drag on the entire economy.

People may not like the fact that much of our material, technological, and medical progress over the past century has been a result of people trying to get rich, but it's still a fact. If getting rich becomes less attractive due to high taxes, fewer people will try. Everyone will suffer if the economy slows, and the non-rich will suffer more than the rich will.

The rich are already paying taxes in other countries so it's like they already left...

Which is why they're all flooding in droves from New York over to New Jersey:

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/07/rich-people-don...

Oh wait.

Gee I wonder if it's actually all bluster and empty threats.

No, it's simply that a threshold exists at which people will move, and it hasn't been reached yet. Like most of the problems discussed in the economic reality article, this is a tradeoff -- people have clearly decided that they are willing to put up with higher taxes to live in New York instead of New Jersey. But surely you can see that there is a point at which it won't be worth it for many people.

Well, the sheer deluge of articles proclaiming an impending exodus every time the idea of raising taxes is mooted and the lack of any evidence for these so called exoduses has made me... skeptical.

Historically the highest US income tax rate was 95%. Guess what?

It only takes a few one-percenters moving away from a state to drain tens, or even hundreds, of millions of dollars from the state's tax revenue. I think this was mentioned in the article: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/01/business/one-top-taxpayer-...

One fact of life is pretty much everything benefits the rich more than the poor

I'm not sure why you've been downvoted. This is generally true, and it's a point made several times in the article -- if policies aimed at taking money from the rich end up damaging the economy, the poor will suffer more than the rich once it all shakes out.

I'm sure the downvotes are due to this thread being a rephrasing of supply-side economics (aka Reaganomics), which has (shown to be|considered to be) (unworkable|undesirable) or otherwise fallen out of favor (at the very least as a political platform).

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