The Great Permacrises

The wealthy will always stay wealthy because the gov are cowards to tax them.

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I don’t really see how inhereting wealth creates jobs for people? Or how people who just inherit their wealth can be considered ‘ambitious’. It doesn’t take a huge amount of ambition to be given money by someone else.

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People build things up to leave it to their children.

Inheritance doesn’t create jobs, but the people who build it up have done. If there’s a clear message that they can’t pass it on to their kids, a number of them could leave and build up that inheritance elsewhere. That’s what happened in the 1970s when Labour hiked up the tax rates on the wealthy.

And ‘wealthy’ starts very small with this tax rise. I’d be looking at over £100k IHT and I definitely don’t consider myself wealthy by a long way.

The U.K. is a successful economy, there will always be people here starting businesses and building up wealth. I wouldn’t worry about some sort of ‘exodus’, so long as the economy remains highly investable wealth will be generated.

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I gather that about 20% of the millionaires have left in recent months which sounds like a bit of an exodus to me.

Which orifice was that statistic pulled from?

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I’m far more optimistic this year. I don’t actually believe short term politics makes a huge difference to the economy, what the economy needs is healthy and educated people, good infrastructure, and long term stability, the rest is achieved by people in it. And this government certainly provides that more than the last one did.

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BBC I think.

Eh? I know quite a few people who are millionaires as I think most people do - wouldn’t we all have noticed if one in five of them permanently left the U.K. in the last few months?

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5% of the population are millionaires. Some of the executive team at my company are millionaires. Lots of pensioners are millionaires, including at least one (not close) family member of mine. Also I live in London and know several people who are millionaires just by virtue of living in a large house they bought a long time ago. The owner of my local plumbing firm is probably a millionaire :smile: I think most people would be able to identify a few people in their lives if they thought about it

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Can we be friends? :innocent:

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I thought we already were :broken_heart::broken_heart::broken_heart::broken_heart::broken_heart:

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Okay can I be friends with your friends? Need me some millionaires in my life as we’re coming up to Christmas.

Momma wants a mixer.

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Unfortunately not one of my friends is remotely a millionaire :joy:. Those are just people I know of.

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I think statistically it almost has to be true, 5% of people are millionaires. Just in daily life of colleagues, friends and extended family most people I would think know more than 20 people.

It’s really not a huge amount of money either - think of a pensioner living in a house worth £400k paid off and a pension fund paying them £30k a year for example. I get not everyone will know of someone like that, but I think most people will.

To put it another way - the idea that 20% of millionaires left the U.K. in the last month is to say 700,000 people left. That would be a pretty huge phenomenon.

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If it didn’t include assets no one would be a millionaire :smile:. There’s only one definition of millionaire and it’s people with a net worth of over £1million. And yes it’s a lot of people.

I think you’ll be waiting a long time for that ‘source’…

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Seems to be a number of places referring to an exodus e.g. Yahoo is part of the Yahoo family of brands

These are the ‘proper’ millionaires i.e. well clear of the £1 million.

Putting slightly aside the fact this says something completely different to your earlier claim…

This source also says that France - a country with a wealth tax, a higher inheritance tax and higher income tax on the wealthy has increased the number of wealthy people living there.

So I guess that proves the idea that wealthy people will leave if taxes go up is a nonsense?

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It’s a slow Friday…

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As far as I can recall it was on the BBC news site several weeks back. I don’t have the time to hunt through all the backlog, but if you want a better source, CNN also cited an exodus.