Reddit reviews The Myth of Millionaire Tax Flight: How Place Still Matters for the Rich (Studies in Social Inequality)

Here's what you're referring to: the book The Myth of Millionaire Tax Flight: How Place Still Matters for the Rich by Christobal Young. Here's a short version of the book. Millionaires and billionaires in the US and Worldwide don't actually leave their homes that much and stay where they have jobs or businesses, in general where they live.
The thing is, that the US and other developed nations should pursue not simply taxing the richest of the rich, but also the crackdown on tax havens.

> As our economy changes it follows that people with skills that are no longer in demand will naturally desire to relocate to wherever their skills are still needed, since it is often easier to do that than learn new skills.

See this is one of those in a vacuum statements that sound great but are completely outside the purview of life.

Lets say you are a node.js developer at the top of your game in your 40's with stagnant wages or even expecting a pay cut. You aren't walking into the home you own and telling your wife and kids, 'hey i know you guys love the schools you fought so hard to get into and i know you will miss all your friends and social circles we have accrued over a lifetime here and honey i know your charity work is really important to you but we must relocate to {mainland Europe} because we'd take an effective 4% paycut'

This kind of stuff just doesn't happen, ever. We have multiple books on the subject, because the same argument is made over and over again about capital flight. The truth is that the decision making process is very complex and its a mixture of many qualitative factors and people have a large preferential bias for what they know.

If you want further reading material and a comprehensive study, check out The Myth of Millionaire Tax Flight: How Place Still Matters for the Rich

A) No one said tax rich people enough to make them poor. This is a ridiculous strawman that people who hate taxes bring up all the time.

B) High taxes really don't make people leave, at least not most rich people. Sure you can find a few examples of the mega-rich leaving because they're mega-rich, but most people do not want to do this. Furthermore, America enjoys a considerable advantage in this respect, allowing them space to raise taxes because.... Every other OECD country (all the nice places to live, basically) has higher taxes. Rich people really don't like moving that much, for reasons.

C) If people got rich for only adding value, then all labourers would be rich because by modifying a commodity, they do in fact add value. Getting Rich is more a confluence of factors, only one of which (and arguably not even the largest) is labour. Luck, previous Capital, place and social position of birth, play a role, and especially in the case of starting Capital, a lot more.

D) This is true. Rich people do pay more, kind of because they have all the money in the first place. If this were to be rectified (Rich people paying less) the disappearance of government social services would probably inspire a violent revolution.

E) Not a big help to the people who are doing without now, but I guess its great that even Rich families, eventually, are leveled with everyone else. Broad social trends that stretch over generations might be useful for research and historical purposes but they are not very comforting to people who must suffer because of imbalances; no one wants to be told that their lot must be crap because, oh well, the system will balance out in time. Who knows, maybe your grandkid's kid will be a millionare.

The idea the rich are rich because they're amazing (variety of reasons) and the poor are poor for an inverse reflection is crap, and used to justify punishing the poor further and rewarding people who have already claimed the lion's share of the rewards.