Comment by balderdash
18 days ago
If you accept the premise that these individuals are net contributors (paying far more in taxes than they consume in services), and that their income and assets are largely non-UK and mobile, then the reality is simple: you either compete for them and treat them differently, or you lose them to jurisdictions that will.
Some individuals are net assets. Many are not.
If I bring in $2 billion in cash to a 100 person town in the US, with a median income of $40k: I can hire none, some, or all of them for $40k to $60k; and make the cost of living too expensive by buying up most of the land, to the point that the remaining stock will cost double or triple the cost.
This is the majority of the oligarch class (Russia, China, Middle East, private equity) who’ve streamed into the democratic West and is an absolute net negative.
Then you have billionaires like Musk (politics aside) who aren’t parking their wealth but building new industries; and the cost of living goes up because of the wages and perhaps demand, as more workers stream in (net positive).
Then you have the rest of the billionaires (high finance, Amazon) whose method is wealth extraction through consolidation and off-shore labor (arguably net negative).