In this case, "bad things happening" is an exodus of the ultra wealthy, which is not so simple to reverse.
Their company already don't produce much in France, it's all imported. They are paying minimal taxes already on what they produce and sell outside of France. And they don't pay taxes personally. So what would we lose if they leave?
For the things that are actually made in France, it's because they have to. They would have moved it already otherwise. So it's physical assets and people that can't be moved or sourced elsewhere. So what they have to produce there, they will still do. Their real estate, their logistic chain vehicles, and their local workshops will stay here. Even if they would sell part of it in fact, the actual physical stuff would stay here.
And what they sell here, they will still do: they are not going to exit the French market just because they can't be physically here so it's not going to affect the economy that much. What, less jet and luxury hotels revenue? It's ok.
And of course, we can increase taxes on their companies so that they get less revenue to compensate for their exile. We tax trading or exporting French-based company stocks so that they can't move that around without paying first.
Besides, once a stock is bought from the IPO, moving it from hand to hand is not investing more money into the company in any way. It's not going back into the economy.
They can move with their bank accounts and bonds, why do we care? It's not something that goes into our economy. They made sure of it.
Their US factory was never profitable.
Nearly every single one has quietly crawled their way back into those respective cities. Agglomeration effects baby!
Listen, I am sure there is some level of taxation at which the rich will in fact decamp and go somewhere else, but empirically we are nowhere near it, nor does it appear that any of the mainstream proposals (either for increased high-bracket tax rates or wealth taxes) get anywhere near it.
For example, MA instituted a 4% surtax on all incomes over $1M and... and the population of payers actually increased 25% since instituting it[1].
[1] https://www.wbur.org/news/2025/04/28/massachusetts-millionai...
This was obviously going to happen when you have a static number and inflation keeps going up. Inflation between 2022 and 2025 has been huge. Perhaps not 25% huge, but a large part of this "growth of payers" is just due to inflation.
Heck the opposite is true - it's why high inflation is so despised, specifically because prices outrun income growth.
Here's a non-exhaustive list of ways the wealth of multiple people can be pooled: creating a joint account, investment clubs, general/limited partnerships, LLCs, crowdfunding platforms, and syndicates (you're on the website of one right now).
There's also government-backed pooling/funding vehicles and banks engaging in various forms of investment, funding, loans. Any existing corporation is also capable of investing themselves.
Government backed funds.. generally don't invest in businesses. There are exceptions - strategic investments for wartime materials and such.
Banks are also.. backed and run by wealthy individuals. This is less "big fish" focused because the bank itself is the owner of the assets and pays a salary to it's executives, but traditionally the person who ran and backed the bank WAS the local wealthy person.
When we look at governments where there aren't really private investors (ie the wealthy) those governments just can't fund things quickly or effectively.
Capitalism is an engine. Liquidity is momentum. Having liquidity leads to more liquidity and wealth, liquidity allows you to get other operations running.
There is no magical government bucket of money. No magical government investors.
For the US as a whole only about 10-15% of startup capital ultimately comes from private investors (of which only some are ultra wealthy). The majority comes from institutions (so ultimately mostly from pension funds)[1]
Ycombinator obviously also sources capital from institutional investors, though we do not know to what degree.
Can't wait to find out where we're gonna move goalposts now - please don't keep me in suspense.
[1] https://www.pragmaticcoders.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/P...
If they are moving businesses away then that could cause the job loss and other bad effects.
So maybe tax the first kind of wealth more?
And note that being an IQ denier would transform your question in an insult to intelligence.
What are you trying to get at? Could you be more direct? I'm having trouble making sense of this post.
How their daily lives will cross vs common experiences with substantial opportunities creators be permanently aborted?
How that wouldn't produce irreversible consequences in a population?
You could say, oh wait, just loosing one Elon has zero impact in a population and yet whole humanity might not become multiplanetary without that one guy in the country that had created the conditions for that raising a ton of talented guys up.
But Social Darwinism is an ugly way to see the world.
attention is finite. land is finite. resources are finite. access to qualified doctors is finite. access to food is finite (something we'll realize at the next great famine). access to water is finite. your time living on earth is finite (and shorter the less money you have).
we operate at a scale where that matters nowadays.
A boy is born into the Colonel Sanderson's plantation. Young eyes see thousands in stooped labor on vast fields disappearing to the horizon.
There is a disconnect between those two ideas. The tax doesn't need to reduce their wealth. Wealthy people generally continue to make money, usually without even having to try or work.
As a random example, Elon Musk was worth roughly $50B 10 years ago, vs about $500B today. That's a $450B gain in wealth, the vast, vast majority of which was untaxed in any way.
We're not talking about taxing $450B from Elon. We're talking about taxing a small percentage of that.
Then I don't understand why most of the rhetoric behind this idea focuses on reducing inequality. If Elon Musk was now worth $100B instead of $500B, how does that make any practical difference?
I’m genuinely confused.
No one is advocating for pure wealth equality or communism. Just making the very obvious assertion that wealth has been concentrating more and more into the hands of a few and that we’re out of balance.
And again that’s just a number you tossed out for a single person. Literally one single person who would still be worth $100,000,000,000.00. One hundred billion dollars...the amount that Jeff Bezos was worth as the wealthiest person on the planet in 2017, just 8 years ago.
The simple reality is that wealth is more consolidated now than at any point in the US’s history. The wealthy are allowed to amass billions and billions of dollars without paying taxes on it, while the rest of us shoulder the burden.
Something has to change.
Bluntly, you’re misunderstanding the basic math of a wealth tax.
Consider that we already tax unrealized gains on real estate as an annually paid tax. The suggestion is to do the exact same thing for other types of assets. That’s it. It’s very simple, and we’re not talking about making billionaires poor. Just trying to make it so that people can't go from $1B to $100B net worth and pay no taxes, while the rest of us fork over 25%+ of our measly 6-figure incomes every year.
Speaking as an American who lives in California (so not directly relevant to the article in question, but 'wealth exodus' is often brought up to scare people about wealth taxes here as well):
Fucking Good. Bye Felicia. Hope they all move to Florida and/or Texas. We'll still be absolute fine here without them.
But also institute land value taxes so they can't be here while pretending to not be here
However, the reason that most municipalities around here will bend over backwards to attract wealthy residents/businesses is because of their chronically underfunded liabilities (pensions, retirement healthcare benefits, etc).