People Vote With Their Feet

On Saturday, The New York Post reported that in the past four years, ten billionaires have changed their residences from New York to Florida.

The article reports:

New York has lost 10 billionaires in the last four years — three of whom fled to Florida — leaving tax coffers lighter by tens of millions of dollars annually.

This year 62 New York-based billionaires appeared on the Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest Americans, compared to 72 in 2019 and 65 last year. 

Investor and Washington Commanders owner Josh Harris, whose net worth was valued at $5.7 billion last year, has grown his fortune to $6.9 billion — but he packed his bags for Florida.

Other billionaires who have relocated from Gotham to the Sunshine State in the last four years include hedge funder Daniel Och — whose net worth now stands at $3.6 billion — and investor Carl Icahn, who’s worth $6.9 billion. 

“You have this incredibly high rate imposed on all of the income of the highest earners [in New York], and living just about anywhere else will substantially reduce your tax burden. Going to Florida will obviously eliminate your individual tax burden, and many of these billionaires clearly have that flexibility,” the National Tax Foundation’s vice president, Jared Walczak, explained.

The article notes:

New York relies on the top 1% of taxpayers to pay for 42% of its tax receipts, and billionaires’ incomes are taxed at the state’s highest rate — a staggering 14.8%, according to Walczak.

Although it’s impossible to quantify the exact loss in state taxes from billionaires’ fleeing without access to private income documents, “If you had someone who was earning $100 million [a year] in New York suddenly move to Florida, that’s something like a $11 million-a-year hit per year recurring to the state,” said Ken Girardin, the research director for the Albany-based think tank, Empire Center for Public Policy.

Even with the tax accountants and tax lawyers that billionaires can afford to hire, eventually they reach the point where it is not worth it to stay in a state that takes more money from them then the Medieval Lords took from the peasants. I just hope that when the leave New York, they leave their big spending government ideas behind.

This Is Really Not Surprising

The Gateway Pundit posted an article today about Bernie Sanders’ plan for healthcare for everyone.

The article reports:

Bernie Sanders is proposing a new wealth tax on billionaires called the ‘Make Billionaires Pay’ act.

He wants to tax wealth they have generated during the Coronavirus pandemic, to fund healthcare for all Americans for one year.

Only for one year?

The article includes some information from CNBC:

Sen. Sanders proposes one-time tax that would cost Bezos $42.8 billion, Musk $27.5 billion

Top tech leaders and other billionaires would be forced to hand over billions of dollars in wealth they’ve gained during the coronavirus pandemic under a new bill introduced by Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Ed Markey, D-Mass., and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y.

The “Make Billionaires Pay Act” would impose a one-time 60% tax on wealth gains made by billionaires between March 18, 2020, and Jan. 1, 2021. The funds would be used to pay for out-of-pocket health-care expenses for all Americans for a year. As of Aug. 5, the bill would tax $731 billion in wealth accumulated by 467 billionaires since March 18, according to a press release. If passed, the bill would tax billionaires on wealth accumulated through the end of the year, however.

Under the bill, tech and other business titans who have seen their wealth shoot up during the pandemic would take huge charges. Amazon and Walmart, for example, have both seen their stocks grow as Americans increasingly relied on their services during stay-at-home orders during the pandemic.

Does anyone remember that Bernie Sanders wanted to tax all millionaires until he became one? The thing to remember here is that billionaires have tax accountants who know how to move money around so that it is not taxable. What happens next is that the program that the tax on billionaires is supposed to fund goes into effect and does not have the money to fund it. At that point, the ‘little people’ like us have to pick up the slack in taxes to pay for the program because we don’t have tax accountants that know how to move money around to avoid taxes. Eventually the middle class pays for all tax increases aimed at the rich. Bernie Sanders and his friends need to study the Laffer Curve. The Bernie Sanders plan is a surefire way to get corporations and their executives to move money overseas (just after President Trump has managed to bring a lot of that money back into America).