Person with money and former NYC'er here. I didn't stay. I moved to a state with less taxes to pay. I haven't looked back.

> This argument is used again and again and I wonder: Why do "people with money" stay where they are when there are countries, islands, even just states where there is less taxes to pay?

Like others said in the comments here: there's a balance of how much money you have to pay as tax until you move to other places. New York is taxing people on top of whatever other taxes are there just because they have money.

My issue is that if people earned the money fair and square, they shouldn't be taxed because they were successful. And this is what this tax does: oh, you afford to buy a 10M home, here's an X% annual tax just because.

I ran a company in NYC for six years before the taxes and onerous regulatory environment convinced me to bail.

The final straw was when we had to hire a fixer to clear up a state regulatory error that would’ve destroyed our business. No amount of calls or letters over months — by me — fixed the issue. The guy we hired got it cleared up in a week.

That’s how I learned firsthand that the more involved the state tries to be in protecting everyone from everything, the more opportunity there is for bad actors and gross inefficiency, and the worse things get.

It's not the "people with money" leaving. There's equal evidence of people with money staying and people with money leaving.

It's people who use their money to generate more value and employ lots of people that are, consistently, leaving. That means that thousands of jobs for the lower middle class are leaving and going to somewhere with a more favorable business environment.

And that's not good (well, it's good for the other city).

It's easy for people in tech hub cities to think that's never going to change but history shows boom towns going bust repeatedly. Sometimes they come back (Seattle). Sometimes they don't (the whole Rust Belt + Upstate NY).

And once the talent pool from a few large companies moves to another metro, whole industries relocate their offices to chase it.