Like, Bye.
Why You Might Want To Read This: Can you see my waving hand? That would be the gesture, collectively, we need to make to the Very Rich who threaten to leave a community if the people vote to raise taxes on those who have, effectively, plundered every city and state. “Like, bye” is a mantra we need on T-shirts, buttons and billboards. Why now? Because there is a concerted effort by the Very Rich to hold everyone hostage by spreading utter bullshit about higher taxes.
To give credit where credit is due for my current favorite “Like, bye” mantra—Seattle’s new mayor, Katie Wilson had this to say:
Then Ms. Wilson, a democratic socialist in her first year in office, went off the cuff: “I think the claims that millionaires are going to leave our state are super overblown,” she said. “And the ones that leave? Like, bye.” [Yours truly added the emphasis]
You gotta love that. A politician not cowered by these m-fers who is also smart enough about the actual economics—a quality in short supply among elected officials who show every day they know very little about economics (something I’ll write about soon in connection to corrupt sports arena funding scams).
Indeed, she was on the mark on two essential points, which I have made in our own state wealth tax initiative effort.
First, it is just NOT TRUE that very rich people leave a community/city/state in droves when taxes go up. There can be an initial blip of a few parasitic rich people who pull up stakes and flee with their ill-gotten gains.
But, generally speaking, it doesn’t happen.
Say it again: it is NOT TRUE that vast numbers of rich people leave a city/state when taxes go up. And certainly not in the numbers that outweigh the revenue gains from higher taxes on the Very Rich.
They want you to believe it—“They” being those Very Rich people who really love their money more than anything else—and they are very, very good at buying off lazy/careerist politicians to spread this rubbish.
Here’s what I wrote in August 2025:
If you hear that nonsense, it’s almost 100 percent coming from shills for rich people and/or craven, careerist politicians who are too dumb or too on-the-take via political donations from the very wealthy—or both.
It’s rubbish.
Let’s take New York. The Fiscal Policy Institute actually found (the full report is here):
This report finds that outside of the Covid pandemic years, high earners move at a lower rate than working- and middle-class New Yorkers. This is true for the three years prior to Covid as well as 2022, the most recent year for which data is available. Further, following two increases in the effective tax rates imposed on high earners— in 2017 and 2021 — there was no behavioral response among high earners that indicated migration out of the state. When high earners do move, they are more like to move to another high tax state than to a low tax state, indicating that taxes are relatively low on the list of motivating factors in high earners’ moving decisions. [bold emphasis added]
Can I get academic as well? Yep! We already knew almost a decade ago the truth from this exciting title: “Millionaire Migration and Taxation of the Elite: Evidence from Administrative Data” (am I fun, or what?)
The most striking finding of this research is how little elites seem willing to move to exploit tax advantages across state lines in the United States. Millionaire tax flight is occurring, but only at the margins of statistical and socioeconomic significance. First, millionaires are not very mobile and actually have lower migration rates than the general population. This is in part because family responsibilities and business ownership are higher among top income-earners, which embeds individuals in their local regions. [Bold is added]
You did catch “LOWER MIGRATION RATES”, right?
AND:
Yet, because migration flows represent a very small share of top income-earners, the observed patterns of migration have little impact on the millionaire population tax base even over 13 years. [Bold is added]
So, the point is: it’s just fear-mongering about losing lots of revenue, fear-mongering fanned by the very greedy people who don’t want to pay more. Pure. Greed.
Will some rich people leave? Sure.
Back to today’s post: So, please, when you hear the nonsense that the rich will leave, please say, loudly:
BULLSHIT!
Second point Wilson made: Like, bye.
Like, bye.
Bye, Bye…
Again, back in 2025, with less diplomacy:
My answer: fuck ‘em. Let us meet you at the border with the exit keys—and a bill to be paid up for all public services enjoyed, and a claw back of all the tax rebates (our money) handed out to any owner of a company for promised “economic development” (aside: the vast sea of tax concessions/incentives are just a colossal waste of public money).
As a community, we should not welcome or protect society’s leeches. We should shun them as pariahs.
Let them go.
In fact, moving communities is mostly a crisis for the poor, working- and middle-income people who can’t afford to stay in many places because of the rapid rise in the cost of living—a crisis the rich parasites fan because they refuse to pay a fair share of taxes that can underwrite maintaining, and even expanding, services the poor, working class and middle-income folks need.
Back to today. Everywhere we look there is a persistent propaganda campaign fanned by Very Rich people who are desperate to hold on to their ill-gotten gains.
Start with the headline for the piece with the Katie Wilson quote in the reliably elite megaphone, The New York Times: “Seattle’s Socialist Mayor Taunts the Rich as Rift With Starbucks Widens”.
The headline sets up the usual counter-posing of fraudulent arguments about taxing the great wealth of a few people. And, most important, you can’t find any hint of what should be the core of a conversation of a completely different frame:
Every single fortune amassed by the Very Rich—every single fortune—is an outcome of the labor of the hundreds or thousands of people who work, for a pittance, for a company;
Every single fortune amassed by the Very Rich—every single fortune—is made possible by the taxes paid by everyone else to build roads to bring folks to work or move goods, or to construct schools to educate/train workers, and fund every single piece of a functioning society;
Which means: taxing the Very Rich is just about getting back the investment everyone else has made.
Like, bye!
Adios, billionaires.