UK Millionaire exodus did not occur, study reveals

Isn't the defining characteristic of the wealthiest demographic their ability to pay for things that they want (like living in London) without any concern over the cost of doing it?

There may have been a gain to attracting super-rich people to live in the UK historically (this is an OLD rule) however people no longer necessarily invest where they live so the benefit is far more limited, and is offset by effects such as making property in London a lot more expensive for everyone else.

In any case the super-rich are only taxed on income they take out of their businesses. That also limits the benefits of both attracting them, and of exempting them.

I do not see any evidence that there was a net benefit from this exemption.

Weren't there other restrictions as well? i.e could only stay 90 days at a time etc.

If there is anything as inevitable as death and taxes, it's "wealthy people complaining about taxes." Every year, the usual articles make the rounds about how all these wealthy people are moving out of California because they're sad about their taxes, and every year it doesn't significantly happen. I'm starting to think the "moving out of California" meme is just a media re-run that the wealthy get together and fund every year, and then it's back to sipping their wine in their mansions in Beverly Hills and Atherton.

Don't discount the possibility that living in that part of California is great and this guy is just virtue signaling.

California refineries are set to shut down and it has huge implications for the state: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/16/business/energy-environme...

Also, if you have millions, does an extra million make a difference ? A even bigger house ? Boat ? You can already have all the space you need, you can eat everywhere and go wherever you want for holidays... Is it worth the hassle ?

The Starbucks CEO lives in California and flies to Washington state every week.

He could move and supposedly save money (no income tax in WA, but there are some Capital Gains taxes).

There are businesses (such as hedge funds) that seem to have left New York and Chicago and moved to Miami, though?

He may have found a clever way to structure his tax exposure.

Massachusetts had an increase in millionaires move there after increasing their taxes. It's all bluster that the wealthy will leave. Where will they go? Talk is cheap.

Because that was when the factories & their support infrastructure moved, not when a handful of entitled wealthy moved.

Note also that while the factories moved to China, the wealthy stayed right here in the US, & didn't go where their money was spent.

Different scale, different consequences.

The list of reasons really is too long to include. From the continued worsening of individual bits of tax legislation such as IR35, dividend allowances, employers NI, corporation tax, etc. to the stalling of real GDP per capita combined with an increased population and the consequentially stretched hospitals, transport, etc, the draconian policing of social media... it's pointless me trying to list it all really.

Dubai is a bit of a trigger for some people. Others I know are going/gone to Portugal, Malta, Cyprus, the US, Aus, Can, NZ, Singapore, France. Your mileage may vary - people leaving can generally give you similar lists of why, but where they go seems varied.

I used to live in Saudi for a time (25+ years ago), and actually really liked much about it then and it had changed markedly when I've been back more recently. I've visited Iraq, I've been detained in Oman under suspicion of espionage and still see virtues in the place. Dubai is positively liberal by comparison and becoming more liberal, while the UK is becoming more authoritarian and despite the official crime statistics, I'm not sure it's as safe as it once was.

>It boggles my mind that any westerner would choose to live and work in Dubai. Their laws and rules are very different from ours.

As long as you're not borrowing money from local entities, you're almost certainly not going to run into any trouble like that in Dubai. In practice Dubai is more libertarian than the UK; the government generally doesn't bother you or care what you're doing, as long as you don't get on the bad side of someone well-connected.

Starting every day with a swim in the sunshine does go a long way.

Buying a house is actually a simple way to avoid the wealth tax.

If you've owned a house for a decade you typically have like 15 or 20 years left on your mortgage and are in debt. The tax worth of the house is some fraction of the sale price, so for a house that one might sell today for €500k the tax value could be like €50k. At the same time, typical debt after only ten years is probably almost half the house price (assuming you had some savings before buying the house). And with debt, that's what your earnings go to... I as an above-median earning Norwegian with house (and thus very negative worth) will probably have decades before getting anywhere near the threshold. And even then you only pay for what's over the threshold, so if you're At the threshold you pay nothing.

Is this meant to say 1,500,000 euros? 150,000 euros is ~$175k USD and the average US home price is currently sitting around $500k for reference.

edit: it does appear that 150,000 is correct, but it is an additional 0.1% tax on wealth above 150,000 euros.

Still basically nothing for the overwhelming majority of people. An additional $1,000 a year for every $1,000,000 you are worth.

Wealth tax on houses (and apartments, cabins etc..) are calculated as 25% of market value up to 10 MNOK and 70% over that. So you'd need to own a rather luxurious house before having to pay a rather modest tax.

Some municipalities also have a separate property tax which iirc is usually an order of magnitude lower than the wealth tax.

Switzerland's wealth tax is a lot more reasonable though. UK is 2%, Norway is 1.1%, the Swiss ones are all below 1% (depends on your canton), ex the Zug canton is 0.21%.

Yes, there is such a dearth of "eat the rich" voices in the US. There is nowhere to buy cheeseburgers here either.