[seibelj]

There’s legality and morality. Moving all my wealth to Cayman (or Texas) may be 100% legal but I thought we were debating ethics. All of these HNers decamping from NYC and SF to Florida and Texas are horrible awful people depriving the local governments of California and New York their deserved taxes!

[yabadabadoes]

You should probably look further into the brain drain which is a global theme with complex ethics. Independent people moving are not really bad or necessarily hurting a state they leave as they send remittances, move back to retire, etc. The overall affect of states incentivizing bulk drains can be brutal though as can the resulting investment decisions of a state that knows it's brightest will be drained. At any rate, in the big scheme of things don't worry about NY and SF, they (and even their own domestic victims) are not victims of drain on average.

[tossAfterUsing]

When you say "deserved taxes", what precisely is the reasoning behind this deservedness?

it seems to me that there's no reasonable way to lay claim to the work product of another person without being a total jerk... maybe i'm mistaken.

[seibelj]

It's mind blowing to me that people get angry about moving wealth to a lower tax country like Cayman, but are totally milquetoast about moving someplace within the same country that has the same effect of lowering one's effective taxation.

If you are worked up about this Cayman thing, then you should be apoplectic if your neighbor moves to Texas or Florida. What horrible, disgusting people who are leaving their former communities to rot! They raised taxes on the rich in order to transfer more wealth to the community, and then the rich up and leave! Such completely selfish actions are galling and it fills me with anger, as it should any self-respecting person. We need the government to track where people live each day, and then make them pay their taxes proportional to where they lived for the rest of their lives. It's only fair to the communities that protected and nurtured them.

We need to outlaw each and every tax dodge. Clipping coupons deprives the state of their sales tax, as the total price is on goods is lowered which reduces the total tax bill, which is why I'm against coupons. How long will we allow this madness to continue?

[tossAfterUsing]

Seriously having difficulty detecting whether this is sarcasm, so forgive me if I am taking some bait...

I'm not sure that I want the government to be responsible for doling out penalties for working (e.g. taxing somebody's productive efforts). I think it would be better if localities had sales taxes only. Penalizing people for visiting/living in a location (by taxing them proportionally for the rest of their lives) seems absurd, empowers a police state, and frightens me for the possible negative externalities of such a system.

Consider the case of a family that was persecuted out of a town (e.g. chased out by bigots)... should each of these individuals be penalized for the rest of their lives for having spent some amount of time "living" in that place?

Surely, that's not a good solution.

[stjohnswarts]

LOL maybe those communities should adopt some sane taxing policies instead of going all in on Nimbyism and "Imma take all your stuff because I know better how to dole it out".

[cm2187]

Well, it’s called competition and I think it is a healthy feedback force.