millionaires

When Taxes Go Up, Millionaires Stay Where They Are

- Adam Clare
A table showing countries’ reported migrating millionaires represented less than 1% of their millionaires, and was closer to 0% for most countries, including the UK.
Source: The millionaire exodus myth, Tax Justice Network, June 2025

In 2024 the UK government modified their tax system and as a result lobbyists and millionaires all claimed that increasing taxes would lead to millionaires fleeing the country. This did no happen. In fact, millionaires don’t move all that much. In this context millionaire means a person with over $1 million in liquid assets, which means that people who have an expensive property don’t get counted because their wealth is tied down. With his information in mind we should all be ok with increasing taxes on the ultra wealthy so that their contributions back to society are comparable to the wealth that they extract.

The Tax Justice Network’s review – co-published with Patriotic Millionaires UK and Tax Justice UK – of the Henley report finds that the number of millionaires claimed by Henley & Partners to be leaving countries in “exodus” in 2024 represented near-0% of those countries’ millionaire populations. For example, the 9500 millionaires widely reported to be leaving the UK in 2024 represented 0.3% of the UK’s 3.06 million millionaires.

Media reporting widely blamed the alleged millionaire exodus on tax policies in the same year that calls for a wealth tax on the superrich gained unprecedented momentum globally. The media reporting was equivalent to 30 news pieces a day on the non-existent millionaire exodus across 2024.

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These Millionaires Want Higher Taxes

- Adam Clare

Office room

When it comes to taxes Americans love not paying them, but now some millionaires want to change that. The Patriotic Millionaires call on the rich to pay their fair share, and they call for that attitude to permeate the globe. Developed nations tend to tax money made through labour at a higher rate than money made through investments, meaning rich people can get richer by not working. The chair of PM, Morris Pearl, recently wrote a good op-ed explaining why he thinks the rich should be taxed and has a new book out.

Most of the ultra–rich make the vast majority of their money through capital gains, not income. They don’t work in the way most Americans work, because they live off of their investments. And it’s a lucrative path, because the top capital gains rate is barely over half of that paid for ordinary income.

That means a billionaire whose investments earn him millions of dollars while he sits around at the beach and goes to fancy cocktail parties pays a lower tax rate on his earnings than almost any working American.

Investing is not inherently more valuable than labor, and it’s simply not true that investing in the stock market creates jobs.

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German Millionaires Support Democracy

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

Remember those super rich folk from the USA who decided to donate half their money? Well, that’s not the German way – and for good reason!

In an interview with Der Spiegel, a German millionaire explains why he thinks it’s best for the state to decide where money should be spent in a democracy.

SPIEGEL: Forty super wealthy Americans have just announced that they would donate half of their assets, at the very latest after their deaths. As a person who often likes to say that rich people should be asked to contribute more to society, what were your first thoughts?

Krämer: I find the US initiative highly problematic. You can write donations off in your taxes to a large degree in the USA. So the rich make a choice: Would I rather donate or pay taxes? The donors are taking the place of the state. That’s unacceptable.

SPIEGEL: But doesn’t the money that is donated serve the common good?

Krämer: It is all just a bad transfer of power from the state to billionaires. So it’s not the state that determines what is good for the people, but rather the rich want to decide. That’s a development that I find really bad. What legitimacy do these people have to decide where massive sums of money will flow?

SPIEGEL: It is their money at the end of the day.

Krämer: In this case, 40 superwealthy people want to decide what their money will be used for. That runs counter to the democratically legitimate state. In the end the billionaires are indulging in hobbies that might be in the common good, but are very personal.

Read the rest on Spiegel Online.

Buy the Planet to Save it

- Adam Clare

Millionaires are buying large tracts of land to protect the environment as oppose to destroying it.

Parque Tantauco, which Piñera created in 2005, is on one of South America’s largest islands, Chiloé, off the coast of Patagonia.

Piñera bought the land and immediately set about protecting the offshore habitat of blue whales and the inland virgin forests.

Pulling out a map of the park, Piñera explains his plan, tracing his finger over a trekking route that will be connected by rustic cabins.

‘We have been buying all the land around us. We started with 110,000 acres and now we have 150,000,’ he says. ‘I want my children and grandchildren to remember me for making one more million? No! So I now have many projects like this.’

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