Conservatives warned of a mass exodus if the democratic socialist won, but experts, and property data, paint a very different picture
The warnings were stark. If Zohran Mamdani were to win the New York City mayoral election, his plans to raise taxes – slightly – on the city’s wealthiest residents would cause millionaires to bolt en masse, decamping to lower-tax states such as Florida and Texas.
The New York Post, a conservative tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch, told readers on an almost daily basis through October that New York would effectively become a ghost town under Mamdani’s mayoralty, a propaganda campaign that concluded the day before the election with the bombastic claim that “nearly a million” people were planning to “flee”.
But a month after Mamdani’s historic win, there is no evidence that rich people are leaving the Big Apple. In fact, they seem to be committing to staying in New York.
The very rich don’t hold a very large percentage of their weath in immobile form. More in investments of various sorts.
And those assets ultimately are tied to something physical.
We’re talking about the ultra rich, not just your average lucky rich guy earning a big paycheck
If hypothetical tax fleeing rich guy has £5bn invested in some American company and they are running from a tax on that asset, what do they do? They have to sell off the asset to someone who wants it (good) or they still face the tax (especially in America where uncle Sam will follow you to the end of the earth to get your tax bill).
Imagine they manage that and don’t make too much of a loss doing so (which is already not realistic, but anyway). Now what do they do with that? Keeping cash as cash is basically flushing money down the drain, so they need to quickly reinvest it in something roughly as financially performant as what it was in before. Problem is if they are a rational investor, their money was already in the best place so wherever it goes next basically has to be a compromise.
The ultra rich are a different breed to what you’re thinking of, even their market investments are big enough it’s generally pretty hard to move them between borders for the purposes of avoiding tax