Comment by natas
2 days ago
The billionaire tax is an experiment, they did put the bar pretty high to measure how many families will relocate (that's super easy to track); once that's measured, it's easy to build a model to adjust this threshold to whatever is advantageous for the state and keep things in balance this way, where the outflow is carefully measured and weighted against the tax threshold. The "hard part" was just getting this to pass the vote; then they can adjust this threshold anytime as voters have already approved it. What isn't measured is that billionaires create jobs "around them"; and, implicitly, jobs will be created somewhere else; unfortunately this model will not measure that.
I’m not convinced billionaires “create jobs” in any meaningful numbers.
Sure, the companies that made them wealthy do, but the billionaires themselves? Doubt.
So if the only consequence of this is that the billionaires flee to Texas, with its regressive taxes, and take the wealth inequality and corruption that goes with them… I’m not seeing that as a bad thing.
Depends on the billionaire. If it's someone with a large chunk of a large company, each billion dollars represents hundreds of skilled people employed to do something. If a state is hostile, then why not move that activity? And that's before the direct lobbying at a federal level.
They are neither competent enough nor incentivized to perform this optimization for the benefit of the state.