There is nothing wrong with being rich, but being poor is not an attractive option.
The trouble is, that we are making ourselves poorer by the penalties that we impose on the rich.
In 2024, as taxes increased and rumours of further tax increased too, 7,500 millionaires took their money and their business overseas to more welcoming and wealth-friendly jurisdictions.
In 2025 that number more than doubled to 16,500. Who knows what the number will have increased to this year.
By millionaires I mean ‘liquid’ millionaires: those with money not just property. The good fortune of many of us living in the New Forest, means that we might count ourselves millionaires just on the basis of what our houses are now worth, although across the country we ‘property millionaires’ have shrunk to our lowest number in two decades, as house prices have fallen.
Alas, we may shrink further as mortgage rates rise and if rumours of new property taxes materialise in the October budget.
But back to the ‘liquid millionaires’, the ones with the ready cash that enables them to just get up and go, taking their wealth with them. The reason this matters is because the large amounts of tax that they were paying, will go away with them too. Putting more pressure on the rest of us to make up the shortfall. Replacing the revenue lost from just one departing millionaire requires an additional 50 average taxpayers.
This week Chris Rokos, Britain’s Third biggest taxpayer announced that he was leaving for Greece. Last year he paid £330 million in tax (and donated £190 million to his alma mater, Cambridge University). It will take an additional 38,000 taxpayers to make up the tax revenue that the Exchequer will lose on his departure.
This week I went to a lecture by Professor Laffer, -of the famous ‘Laffer Curve’ -which is often alleged to show that the higher taxes go, the lower the tax revenue that will be raised. Left-wing economists lampoon this by concluding that zero taxes will give rise to massive revenue.
The Laffer Curve shows nothing of the Sort!
The Professor began his lecture rather provocatively by telling the audience that he wasn’t interested in our opinions, any more than we should be interested in his opinion!
He explained that he was only interested in facts, as we too should only be interested in facts.
He then took us through the facts, case by case, where high marginal rates of taxation were reduced dramatically, leading to increased economic activity and very substantially increased tax revenue. The reality is that, though the curve has wider tax implications (low tax economies grow faster and prosper), it describes the relationship best between tax cuts and increased tax revenue at the top end of the scale. Higher taxes on those with high incomes incentivises them to employ specialist lawyers and accountants -because they can afford to- in order to minimise their exposure, or -because they have the freedom, to go elsewhere.
If loopholes and shelter schemes are removed, and their taxes cut, that effect is reversed.
The top 1% of earners in UK, earn 13% of our income but pay 28% of our income tax. We cannot afford to lose them.
In a world where capital moves freely, we are in a competitive market to attract high taxpayers.
Our competitors are laughing at our determination to export ours, to them.
We are killing the Goose that lays the golden egg.