alt Hacker NewsThe answer is just no. Massachusetts passed a tax on income over a million dollars and despite the ads that were obvious lies, we have more millionaires now than we did a few years ago. Turns out, rich people like to live in places that have well funded infrastructure, good schools, a thriving art scene, etc...
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To be brutal about it the question isn't a how many more millionaires. Say Massachusetts has 10 new millionaires. That's great. What if Florida has 1000 new millionaires? Suddenly 10 doesn't sound great.
To my mind it's a revenue maximizing question. Is Massachusetts hitting that metric right? I have no clue. I do suspect that the voters and the people advocating taxes like this in Massachusetts and California are not thinking in those terms. I think they are doing this out of some sense that anyone making that much has to be doing something unfair and that an inefficiency in revenue is just money spent towards fixing that unfairness.
The correlation between higher state and local taxes (beyond some reasonable baseline) and improved public service is tenuous at best in much of the US.
I'm happy to concede Massachusetts may very well have found the right balance, but there's plenty of studies on this in aggregate.
There's unsurprisingly a modest but statistically significant migration of millionaires from high-tax to low-tax jurisdictions.
https://www.asanet.org/wp-content/uploads/attach/journals/ju...
Yep people will pay rates in "high tax" US states where you're still only paying ~40% ish total income tax and they're really nice places to live.
That would still be considered a fair and reasonable level of tax by european standards.
Obviously there is a level though - if you made it 95% then people would leave. I don't think there's any reasonable argument that the level doesn't exist, the question is where is it for a specific place at a specific time