Income tax has no effect on the uber wealthy. Only wealth tax does. You're thinking of the upper middle class
this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2026
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It's almost like the rich themselves aren't the drivers of the economy but instead it's the financial infrastructure and the actual producers and they're dependent on that. Funny idea.
It's definitely not the financial infrastructure. It's just sucking wealth from elsewhere.
Depends on what you mean by economy and financial infrastructure but in the West you're mostly right. Since globally we're a market economy dependent on trade, you'd still need financial infrastructure no matter what, even if you're talking about building loans for starting co-ops or whatever. That doesn't mean you have to allow capital accumulation to run wild. But the West is built around rent seeking and largely increasing asset pricing. Hell if property values go down and people aren't able to extract rents from the productive economy most Western nations view that as an economic crisis. They'll quickly sacrifice employment to prevent that. That's why it's so attractive to park capital in Western real estate and other nonproductive "capital". At least until the parasite grows so large that, whoops the economy can't run anymore. As it stands there's a homeostatic mechanism that allows this rent seeking to exist while also essentially forcing some of the productive capital to be funded to see enough returns to also grow to a degree. They call this hedging. But even in those cases they're largely investing in things that create financial moats like AI is proposed to be though extremely expensive infrastructure or through consolidaton and regulatorh capture like what's happening in US healthcare vs investing in capital that will compete in a commodity market.
They should add another 2% every year until they do leave, or are taxed out of existence.
Ah, the landlord’s heuristic. And yet, applying it to the landlord class itself is considered novel. Why?
Because they have all the power?
Only the power we let them have. Early voting begins in three weeks.
It's almost like taxing the rich works, by injecting funds for services that benefits everybody!
Exactly this. If the infrastructure is good, you get a well educated, productive, reliable workforce. The rich need to be taxed, for their own good. Many of them realise this and welcome it, because they can't do it for themselves. The government has a duty to do it.
Personally I'm for the transfer of ownership of the means of production to the working class, or workplace democratisation at the very least, but even neoliberals should be on board with a wealth tax, regardless of the fact that a side effect is a more enjoyable life for the riffraff.
Hahaha where's "but the rich will leave" crowd now?
this is less a "the rich will leave" and a "more people became 'rich' because of inflation and loss of purchasing power"
Not surprising. Leaches do much better when there is an abundance of blood in the host body.
Florida just ended PROPERTY taxes, so now the rich don't have to pay state income taxes OR property taxes on their big estates.
So how do we pay for police, fire department, education, roads, etc.? They didn't bother to discuss that at all, they just passed it.
So INTELLIGENT rich people understand that Florida is about to be a state full of uneducated people, poor police presence, crumbling infrastructure, and worse. It won't be long before desperate people realize where all the money is, and know that police response will be slow.
Better to move to a city on the rise, like NYC, and live where the Police Commissioner is a billionaire nepo-baby, who sees her primary job as protecting the wealthy.
What's that old saying, taxes buy you civilization or something along those lines.
Also genocide
They do those where there are no roads...
Damn I honestly wish it made them leave. Theres a strategy in there that ends with a sort of forced Atlas Shrugged situation, except they dont have magic electricity to keep the lights on.
If the all leave everybody else can have a party.
I'd prefer for none of them to leave. They want to make it hard for labourers? We can do the same to them.
Let them undergo the labour conditions that they subjected their worst-off servants to. Let them be confiscated of all their wealth and that wealth redistributed among all former wage slaves.
Not only that, but they also want to live in functioning cities with normal, nice people.
Which is considerably easier to achieve IF THEY PY THEIR FUCKING TAXES
It was always a transparent bluff, there's no way they would actually go live in the third-world shithole states their pet politicians have created
Sorry to be that guy, but the headline in the photo says “Millionaire” with an M. That’s not necessarily uber wealthy, especially in New York. Most NYC millionaires are working class, depending on whether you lump centimillionaires in that category.
Most NYC millionaires are working class
I mean, it depends on how you define the term. Approximately 8% of Americans are defined as individuals with a net worth in excess of a million dollars. Most of the millionaires I know are just retirees, or people on the brink of retirement, who have accumulated 401ks / retirement funds + real estate in excess of a million dollars. Given the exploding price of housing, this isn't a terribly hard bar to clear so long as you got into the market before the 21st century. My aunt bought a flat in Lower Manhattan in the 1970s for around $80k and now it's worth north of $3M.
The bigger problem is household debts - educational debts, credit card debts, outstanding mortgage payments, etc - plus the burndown of late-stage retirement caused by end-of-life medical costs and care.
But when you get into multi-millionaires (particularly decimillionaires and centimillionaires) you're getting into a level of wealth that provides a million or more dollars of passive income annually. And that's a very different socio-economic condition to be in.
The text says the tax is on “incomes over $25M”. There’s no need to be pedantic about it especially when the headline reads “Millionaire Class” which wouldn’t reasonably be associated with a pensioner with a couple million in a retirement account.
Where are they going to go, fucking Nebraska?
they will never leave nyc and cali. having a house there is a status symbol, and that is all the wealthy care about.
Of course not.
Imagine feasting at an all-you-can-eat buffet with all variations of food from all over the world, and then the waiter informs you that you can have as much of everything as you like for free, except that you're not allowed to eat the last slice of cucumber if there's only one left.
Would you leave?
hell no i'd hook the wait staff up with weed so i could come back for free every day. build a [COMPETITIVE ALL YOU CAN EAT LOUNGE] off to one side where we have daily challenges like highest stack of tortilla chips without making a fucking mess, and when you win you get your polaroid up on the wall of shame
i'd guard that slice of cucumber with a fork
Dammit, how are we gonna run them off now?! Lol
Pitchforks and torches. Maybe some tar and feathers
I mean, with inflation as it stands, you'd expect the rate of increase in the number of millionaires to be growing nationwide.
Sort of the joke with inflation. On a long enough timeline, everyone becomes a millionaire.
Two damn percent?
They have 25 million+ and they're whining about $50,000?
Fuck em! Do you know how much my life would change if I had an extra $50,000, let alone $25 million?
50k wouldn’t do much for me but 25 million different level of wealth. I just can’t understand why you’d keep going like, I’m leaving on month long trips at that point. There is no award for amassing wealth
It's also shown when people have enough, crime goes down, quality of life goes up, artificial scarcity anxiety goes down. Hmm, so then the for-profit prisons won't be full and workers will have more bandwidth to question why they don't get more of the pie, like people in other wealthy countries do, more stable and wouldn't ever accept the downgrade to system usa.
Of course the rich are getting richer and richer. It's quite a challenge not to grow richer once you're already rich. You'd have to make several consecutive really bad decisions to achieve that.
The problem for them is that taxing the rich helps the poor, and slightly narrows the gap between the two classes. This is precisely what they cannot stand.
It doesn't matter how much money the rich have, or how much more they will make in the next 12 months. What matters is how much more than you they have, because that's what dictates their elite status in society.
All billionaires would happily lose all their billions, as long as it meant the poor lost even more. Because that would result in them being relatively richer, and so more powerful in a capitalist society.
This is also why they will oppose a shorter work week till their last breath. Sure, it'd benefit them, but it'd benefit regular people more, and so the elites would become less elite as a result. This is the only thing that really matters to them.
Without the actual article, it's difficult to say what they mean by millionaire class, but a millionaire is not ultra rich. That's a middle class person who is doing well. So if by "millionaire class" they mean even people who have less than let's say five million dollars, then the data will include a lot of working middle class people. Especially in places like NYC where housing prices can be sky high.
This says more about inflation than wealth flight.
It was always a bluff.