AOC and Warren's confiscatory tax policy will create wealth exiles

John Crudele:

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who represents Massachusetts and is 69 years old, probably followed rock and roll culture in the 1960s when the “British invasion” changed our music scene. It’s also when a lot of British rock groups including some of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones decided that England’s taxes took too much of their earnings — so they left the country.

They were, according to the phrase of that day and today, “tax exiles.”

Both Warren, who is running for president, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the young freshman congresswoman who represents Queens and the Bronx, have proposed that Americans who happen to be very rich pay upward of 70 percent tax on their incomes.
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It should also make people worry that raising taxes to the moon will kill the incentive of creative business people to set up shop in the US. What if the late Steve Jobs, who founded Apple in the mid-1970s or Microsoft’s Bill Gates had felt that US taxes were too high and decided to set up shop in a tax haven country?

These creative business people might just do what the Rolling Stones did.

When each of the band’s members owed the British government a quarter million dollars — which was a huge amount at the time — the band moved to France to avoid the taxes. They also channeled their earnings from then on through a Netherlands holding company.

“You made 100 (British) pounds, they took 90,” Mick Jagger once told CNN. “So it was very difficult to pay any debts back.”

Jagger and bandmate Keith Richards are still tax exiles. Richards once told the New Yorker magazine: “The whole business thing is predicated on the tax laws. We left and they (the British) lost out.”

The Stones weren’t the only ones who fled British tax laws. David Bowie first moved to the US and then to Switzerland. Rod Stewart moved to Los Angeles and was quoted as saying: “The government thinks it’ll tax us bastards right up to the hilt because we won’t leave, but that’s wrong because I will if I want to.”

The Beatles’ Ringo Starr moved to Monte Carlo. Cat Stevens went to Brazil. Sting went to Ireland but then returned.
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There’s another big reason why Elizabeth Warren in particular will eventually back off her thoughts about high taxes, and it’s called “donors.” If she seriously wants to become president, then Warren will have to cozy up to rich people who will pay her campaign bills.

And rich people aren’t going to give her money if she is trying to tax away their wealth. That, unfortunately, is the way modern politics works.
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I am not sure that Warren is smart enough to back off her confiscatory tax policy.  She has always struck me as an intellectual lightweight and this is just the kind of nonsense that Democrats have pushed most of their lives.  They would rather have a sluggish economy and create dependency rather than use tax policy to create jobs and independence.   AOC is the product of a failed education in economics.  Her professors should be canned for malpractice if they taught her what she spouts.