As a wealthier person (income of ~1m/year, give or take), I could not more strongly support Mamdani (no 'h' in Zohran's last name afaik). I want a candidate like him in my city to vote for.
If you're still measuring wealth by income, you're probably not in the bracket that is being discussed here. $1 million per year is an extremely comfortable income, but it would take 30 years of saving that, post tax, before you hit $30 million in net worth, which is the entry point for UHNW status.
I do see your point, but it's highly unlikely that they are putting their wealth into a HISA for 30 years. There is likely 0 people who got to UHNW through saving money.
Totally. I'm someone who could choose to enter the capital class via purchasing rental properties or investing heavily in stocks, but I deliberately do not.
Capital class wildly different than wealthier working class. But in all honesty, bring the taxes all the way down to me at least. Anyone making a million a year could be taxed a lot more and still live comfortably. The capital class above me could afford a LOT more taxation and still live lives of unbridled luxury.
"very wealthy" is heavily understating just how ludicrously wealthy some of these people are compared to the vast majority, and it's reflected in historical numbers.
I am wondering why "very wealthy" would be so stressed by increased taxes. Don't they have ludicrous wealth, shouldn't it have almost no material impact for them?
Are there money games I am unaware of that means they are running brittle houses of cards and marginal percentage increases in taxes would topple their empires?
I just don't understand the fear or concern, but I am not ludicrously wealthy so I suppose I wouldn't.
If someone is truly strong then they have strength to spare for others. I guess I assume the same would be true of wealth, but perhaps you don't get ludicrously wealthy by being proportionally generous.
They are so ludicrously wealthy that even a very small increase in percentage points of tax ends up being a very large number, and no one likes to see a very large number of their “hard-earned” dollars get “taken away”. The marginal value of each dollar to them I don’t think is a calculation that is very accessible to our emotional human minds.
The maximum effective rate on long-term capital gains was 45.5% but the top marginal rate on ordinary income was 91%.
In any case, this is all a major deflection resulting from the lie that the low job creation rate is due to "the threat" of a possible future mayor rather than tariffs.
This statement is also supported by the fact that despite the relatively high taxes in NYC billionaires will jump through all loops necessary to effectively still live there just not on paper
If a nation's fortune hinges on permitting a handful of extremely rich individuals to extract wealth with impunity, wield their immense hoard to buy up major media organizations and communication platforms, use those assets to continually suppress labor and consumer protections, and fix political elections by way of SuperPACs and other dark-money slush funds... well, that isn't my idea of a robust society or economy.
We've done fine without them in the past, and we'd be better off without them now. At the end of the day, labor and its fruits are the primary origin of value in an economy, not the handful of individuals that have had the immense luck and/or dubious ethics required to capture that value for their personal gain.
1) That we're at the threshold for taxes that the wealthy will accept. I would bet many wealthy folks feel attached to their homes as their identity, and it would take some amount to price them out. Like, clearly a billionaire would leave if the cost to stay was a 100% of their wealth, but would probably stay if it was $10 more in taxes. So there's a very nebulous line somewhere in between. I suspect we are not close to that line.
2) That wealthy people living in an area are storing their wealth or declaring that area as their home. Plenty of ways to shield wealth from local taxes, and plenty of ways to claim a place as your home without being taxed by it.
3) That having wealthy people in your community is a net positive for the community. Wealthy people tend to use a lot more resources and distort local politics for their personal gain rather than the gain of the community. Maybe we'd be better off if they weren't around, and several families moved in to take their place. Wealthy people don't ride public transit, normal folks do. Wealthy people can push city council positions to reduce transit, normal folks don't have that influence. Maybe we need more normal folks around.
4) That businesses owned by the wealthy are a net positive compared to, e.g., workers co-ops. Maybe we could be a bit more collective in our approaches and a bit less lionizing towards the wealthy person who got lucky. Maybe we need more community oriented businesses run by members of the community they live in and fewer wealthy business owners racing to the bottom.
If they want to sell off all their assets and leave, then lets see them do it. If they don't want to sell their assets, I don't see why it can't be seized if they leave.
It is, probably because it has a 39% tax rate on income over $180k, and no capital gains (stock sales are considered income and taxed at income tax rates).
The fundamental question is who gets to start, control, own and grow businesses. Who makes those decisions? If it’s not private citizens, it is government functionaries. The latter has been tried many times. It can just about work, but only barely, and it has all the same problems of patronage, cronyism, monopolisation and labour abuse as capitalism but x10.
We also tried the 'let the market do whatever it wants' method and it ended up with babies being fed milk with formaldehyde in it, pharmaceuticals that were mostly opiates or ethanol, and entire industries owned by single families.
For many of our current societies I would say that we have failed to distribute the available resources. And even more so if we look at how we have failed distributing resources between societies and countries.
> Capitalism is a morally reprehensible way to distribute resources
Nah… UK’s economy is broken due to the fact we’ve never recovered from the financial crisis
It’s also due to the lack of investment in heathcare, education and other public services over the last 14yrs
Britain still has very many extremely rich people - London has more billionaires than NY - Serious Money by Caroline Knowles is an interesting exploration of the subject
Just one more follow up, the US is 27th on social mobility, behind most EU countries, Australia, New Zealand and most other countries which are consider "western"
You are thinking of “social mobility”, which is a term of art that doesn’t mean what people assume it means. It is essentially a zero-sum rank of your income compare to your neighbor. You can become poorer and still be “socially mobile” or much richer and not be “socially mobile”.
Social mobility has very little to do with increasing your economic welfare in any absolute sense. It strongly favors countries with highly compressed wages and doesn’t imply much about ease of increasing income since it is only weakly correlated with that.
Economic, class, social mobility classically means ability for an individual to attain significantly more wealth than they were born with and ability to change their and their family's lifestyle. In which case it's not zero sum.
But yeah, some statistics indeed are just likelihood that the ranking order changes, or even self-reported...
It's like the definition of "middle class". Everyone thinks they're middle class. The OECD calls anyone with 75% to 200% of the average income "middle class". Classically the term means you are above the labour class but not noble.
AFAIK the stats do show Europe passing the US in class mobility as of about 20 years ago. It is notable as Europe of course had low class mobility and the US just dominated class mobility.
AFAIK class mobility is measured by class at birth compared to adulthood (i believe as measured by net household wealth)
Also most easily available statistics are from 2020. The US economy has been a massive winner post-Covid and has diverged a lot from some countries.
This website should be a good example. The typical Sr Software dev in the US would be in the top 1% to 0.1% of earners in European countries and Canada. The US has more millionaires than many entire European countries have citizens.
A top 10% earner in the US would be in the top 1% in Canada. An AVERAGE earner in the US is about top 10-15% in Canada.
Class mobility (or social mobility) indicates ability to go from lower to middle class, working class to generational wealth, etc... All income statistics show the US as having a particularly large amount of high income earners, self made millionaires (and billionaires), etc...
Certainly from an entrepreneurial stand point it's beneficial. On the other side, it's current descent in to an authoritarian police state is kinda hard to ignore.
Anyone who took macroeconomics knows that stratifying an economy of ~370 million people by ambition ends with the most ambitious employees working the behind-the-counter at McDonalds. None of them ever end up at the fed, or filling white-collar corporate seats, that's been an open secret since the '80s. By the sound of it, you're just regurgitating Tweets you read in 202X while VCs were insecure about China whooping their ass in natsec, AI and robotics.
Support ambition all you want - just don't come crying to us when the B2C market dries up entirely.
> The average European is poorer than the average person from Mississippi, the US’ poorest state
Mississippi has a GDP per capita of $53k.
11% of Mississippi's population has no health insurance.
Mississippi is one of the highest inequality states in the US. Its median income is $30k. It's Gini Index is 49%.
It has poor physical and social infrastructure by advanced country standards.
Spain has a GDP per capita of $35k. Its median income is $20k.
Everyone in Spain is covered with modern healthcare.
Spain has a nationwide high speed rail network. A lot of its infrastructure is top-notch compared to Mississippi and even wealthy parts of the US.
This is despite Spain having some of the highest inequality in Europe, and undoubtedly a host of other problems, including decreasing affordability for average people. Yet it's inequality is far lower than Mississippi, with a 31% Gini Index.
So perhaps GDP per capita doesn't tell the full story. Also, I'm being fair by comparing Mississippi to one of the poorer countries in Europe, not one of the middle or wealthier countries.
I'm Spanish. I make about 40k/yr. I wouldn't move to the US for, say, 200k.
I have excellent 0€ out of pocket 0 paperwork healthcare. I walk to my 35 hours per week job. I have about 50 days of vacation each year. I have a small second home down in the beach to enjoy them. In my 150k people hometown some years there is a murder or two, and most years there isn't one. When people rob a business they might threaten with a tiny Swiss Army knife, or maybe just yell very hard.
> I know several Spaniards who emigrated to the US,
As do I. They all seem to have moved to cosmopolitan places with advanced economies, not Mississippi. I also have friends and relatives that have migrated to Spain. Overall, there is no mass migration in either direction.
> The situation you describe is… one of statistics and not reality
A high speed rail network and universal healthcare are not statistics, they are as real as it gets.
But I definitely agree that Spain is probably not a good place if you want to make an absolute shitload of money.
"Poorer" in what aspect(s), exactly? Because not everything is about gross monetary amounts when it comes to a good life. Even the poorest of the European nations (never mind that EU !== Europe, and that by invoking Europe you're also talking about the countries with the highest QoLs in the entire world like the Scandinavians) still have superior worker protections & medical infrastructure that doesn't leave the poor in generational debt than the US, which for me both rank infinitely higher than earning more money. I'm sure the poor Mississippians wouldn't mind some of those 30+ paid vacation days my Spanish friends get in exchange for earning a bit less.
This is an incredibly naive take in trying to postulate the US as a better place to live, and genuinely makes me curious how much you’ve actually seen of EU.
Quality of life, by a number of metrics like HDI, is higher in (Western) European countries compared to the US. And even while total salaries might be lower, healthcare infrastructure, life expectancy, food quality etc are better.
Pure take-home money doesn’t tell you the entire picture.
And for pure anecdata, I have friends who migrated to the States and then moved back to EU when they had kids because EU seemed like the safer and better place to raise them.
You can find anecdata to tell pretty much any story you want to tell though.
I don't know how you came up with that statement. It certainly does not reflect reality unless you don't count Sweden, Germany, Canada as part of the western world.
>Individual studies have estimated absolute mobility rates for recent cohorts of roughly 50% in the US (Chetty et al. 2017), 53% in Canada (Ostrovsky 2017), 70% in Germany (Bönke, Harnack, and Luthen 2019; Stockhausen 2018), and 77% in Sweden (Liss, Korpi, and Wennberg 2019).
Canada's GDP per capita is barely above 2013 levels (~4%), meanwhile the US' is 60% higher. Wages in Canada have been stagnant, there is NO social mobility at all, it's completely fucked.
Where I came up with this statement? Actually knowing things about economics and following the CURRENT numbers. Not a 2017 study (which probably took a couple years and using data from 2015 or earlier) which is completely worthless in 2025.
The globe can collaborate to make sure capital has nowhere to fly to. Form the USSA and get china onboard and let the USSR come back (they’re still the loyal opposition in today’s Russia) and capital will just fucking take it like they deserve to. What, you gonna go to the moon now?
The US used to have to class mobility. The completely disproportionate wealth of the current crop of billionaires is evidence instead that that mobility has disappeared, and that the accrual of wealth by the already wealthy is the dominant class "mobility" pattern today.
It seems reasonable at first glance, but I’ve seen no proof of it. California, usually mentioned as having high taxes, still has a large percentage of the ultra-wealthy in the USA. Same with NYC. Sure some notable persons have changed their addresses, but overall, they are they hurting?
Is there any documented case of a rich-popular municipality increasing taxes on the ultra wealthy and seeing the tax levy go down?
That is one of those questions where if you're asking it, I do question how serous you are in seeking out answers. It is mathematically guaranteed that an optimal rate exists, the topic has been an ongoing research question for several centuries and it is hard to avoid if you spend time arguing economics. Wikipedia points out [0] that scholars dating back to Ibn Khaldun have been working on the topic of pinpointing an optimal tax rate for maximising income.
So while I admit to not providing you with a study in this comment [1], it is pretty obvious they have been done and I don't see what there is to challenge on the topic. Obviously there is an optimal tax rate for maximising revenue, this is an area where there has been a huge amount of research done and if a municipality pushes their rates beyond that point (which will happen with some regularity) it'll see its tax take go down. There isn't much to document, anywhere with taxing authority would be feeling out limits experimentally all the time.
> Sure some notable persons have changed their addresses, but overall, they are they hurting?
They moved states for tax reasons, so yes. Otherwise they wouldn't have moved. If notable people are starting to move then the system sounds like it is very close to the critical point.
So just to be clear: there is some undetermined optimal number, but so far no place has determined it and no place gone on the other side of it such that the ultra-wealthy left any particular area of note, causing a decrease in tax revenue. Got it. Thanks for the info!
> ...but so far no place has determined it and no place gone on the other side of it...
This is what I mean when I say I'm not sure if you're actually interested in the answer. The Wikipedia article is a pretty thorough treatment. This isn't some new or unexplored area, it is about as well trodden ground as the economists have. There isn't any need to gather more evidence to retest it yet again, the numbers are well known.
The income-maximising tax rate is between 60 and 75% and depends a bit on local conditions (probably mostly migration and language barriers). Lots of places have gone beyond it, happens all the time, and they generally lower their tax rates when someone points out they could make more money that way. You'd probably find the California tax people do studies on this sort of thing fairly regularly; not that anyone particularly cares or that I'm going to try and look it up. The real question is whether the government should even be trying to maximise the tax take.
> Is there any documented case of a rich-popular municipality increasing taxes on the ultra wealthy and seeing the tax levy go down?
Sort of but AFAIK nothing similar to this. There is some evidence of this occurring in Europe, notably France, but it was structural pretty different. Connecticut, NY, and Jersey often trade a small amount of residents depending on taxes year to year, but none of those individuals are really leaving the NYC economy.
NYC is also pretty unique in the availability of certain high-income jobs and amenities catering to the ultra wealthy. Like high-tax California (and America generally), the extra income and benefits from living there outweigh the costs for many. Massachusetts implemented a millionaire tax and saw a net increase in ultra wealthy individuals.
NYC is already one of the most expensive places in the country. People either live there because it’s worth the cost, or it’s the best place for them to make more millions. There is little evidence to support a minor wealth tax would change that meaningfully.
You also failed to mention how popular Mamdahni is among every day, non-rich voters. They seem to agree with me.