The gilded mendicant has filed again. In Why Britain Is Shedding Millionaires, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board mourns 35,000 British residents worth £1 million or more who decamped for friendlier climes, blames Britain’s “hostile tax climate” — 45% top income rate, 24% capital gains, 40% estate tax, the recent end of the foreign-earnings shield — and warns that any wealth tax would only accelerate the stampede. The board is paid to write that brief. The brief is wrong.
That 35,000 figure comes from the Adam Smith Institute, a free-market tank with a standing interest in showing millionaire flight — not from Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. The board cites the finding that Britain’s top 1% pays 29.1% of British income taxes as evidence of overburden. It does not note that the same top 1% holds roughly 23% of British household wealth, per the Office for National Statistics, and pays nothing comparable on its capital. The board cites the 66% poll support for a wealth tax and frames it as mob pressure rather than democratic preference. The class is the one Frank Wilhoit named: an in-group the law protects but does not bind. The gilded mendicant has been filing the same brief for sixty years, in the same coat.
The mechanism is older than the publication. Concentrated wealth captures the policy environment that lets it relocate on demand; the relocation is then mobilized as a threat against any redistribution. The threat works because the alternative — the public absorbing the cost of underfunded services, neglected infrastructure, an aging population whose pensions the board does not mention — has no lobbyist. The op-ed is the apparatus: it monetizes the threat into a respectable editorial, and the respectable editorial monetizes it into policy. Millionaire flight is not an unintended consequence; it is the predictable output of a system designed to produce it.
Britain’s top rate is 45% on income above £125,140, and 24% on capital gains. The board calls this “hostile.” In the country that publishes the Journal, the equivalent is a 37% rate on income above roughly $600,000 and a 20% capital-gains rate — and the 25 richest Americans, per ProPublica’s leaked IRS files published June 8, 2021, paid a combined true tax rate of 3.4% on $401 billion in new wealth between 2014 and 2018. Warren Buffett’s true rate: 0.1%. Jeff Bezos paid $0 federal income tax in 2007 and 2011. Elon Musk paid $0 in 2018. The board calls Britain hostile. I would call Britain ordinary, and the country the board serves something worse.
I have watched this picture since Nixon. Leona Helmsley’s housekeeper testified under oath in 1989 — testimony Helmsley denied — that “we don’t pay taxes; only the little people pay taxes”; Helmsley was convicted of 33 felony counts including tax evasion. The hedge-fund carried-interest fee is taxed as capital gains instead of wages — both parties have promised to close it for twenty years, and it is, as I write, still there; one Republican candidate said in 2015 that hedge fund managers were “getting away with murder,” and the exemption survived his own tax bill intact. I won’t call that exemption a loophole; the board reserves that word for taxes it doesn’t like. The basis-step-up at death erases a lifetime of unrealized gain for income-tax purposes; the estate tax, with its roughly $14 million exemption, lands on almost no one. The “buy-borrow-die” arrangement — borrow against the asset, never sell, never realize, die with the basis reset — was documented for the ProPublica 25 in particular detail: Musk pledged roughly 92 million Tesla shares as collateral for personal loans, valued at about $57.7 billion in May 2021, and never sold a share.
That is the league Britain’s 35,000 are competing to enter. The pattern is not new. In 2012, HSBC admitted laundering money for Mexican drug cartels and sanctioned regimes in Iran, Cuba, Sudan, Libya, and Burma, and forfeited $1.256 billion in a deferred-prosecution agreement; not one individual was prosecuted; Senator Grassley called it “quite literally” a get-out-of-jail-free card. In 2009, the unit at AIG that blew up the firm paid itself $165 million in retention bonuses after the firm took roughly $182 billion in federal support — 73 employees made millionaires — and not one executive from the conduct that caused the crisis went to prison. The private-equity owners of Toys “R” Us collected, per the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, $470 million in fees — $128 million in transaction fees, $185 million in “advisory fees,” $143 million in interest — and 33,000 workers lost their jobs initially with no severance owed. The Senate held Ralph de la Torre in criminal contempt in September 2024 — its first such vote in over fifty years — for his time running Steward Health Care, which Cerberus bought in 2010, ran into roughly $9 billion of debt across 31 hospitals, and walked out having nearly quadrupled its money. The Purdue Sacklers extracted billions from OxyContin; the company pleaded guilty in 2007 and again in 2020; the Sacklers were never charged. The 2025 bankruptcy settlement reached $7.4 billion — and only about $850 million was set aside for individual victims, paid over fifteen years. The board does not mention this when it warns London about its tax bite. The omission is the brief.
The millionaire who leaves London for Switzerland is not fleeing a tax. He is exercising an option the rest of us are not issued. The host country built him roads, courts, schools, a central bank, a currency, and a police force — and he paid, by the leaked-IRS evidence, a 3.4% rate while the work was done. Now the work is priced, and he is leaving. The board writes this as the country losing. The country is being billed. The board calls the 35,000 “wealth-creators.” The record calls them what they are: people whose wealth was created at a desk, in a tax shelter, in a captive private fund, in a deferred-prosecution agreement, or in a hospital chain bled until it died — the un-billed, who took what the country built and never paid the price.
The board’s closing argument is that the top 1% of British earners already pay 29.1% of British income tax — as if the share of the bill proves the share of the wealth. The 1% of British earners who pay 29.1% pay it because they hold the share of the wealth that produces the income; the arithmetic is what it is. The board does not mention the 25 un-billed Americans who paid, in the same five-year window, 3.4% on $401 billion in new wealth. Don’t change the subject, dear — the subject is whether you can be billed for what you took. The board does not mention the carried-interest exemption that has cost the U.S. Treasury tens of billions a year. The board does not mention that the people fleeing Britain are not fleeing a tax — they are fleeing an obligation to choose, finally, between the country that built them and the country they can afford to buy.
The richest man in Britain can move to Switzerland. The nurse in the National Health Service cannot move her hospital. The teacher cannot move the school. The small-business owner cannot move the road. The millionaire’s exit is a choice; the rest of ours is a sentence. The board calls the choice a tragedy. The board’s next editorial on the subject will read exactly like this one — the reader can already draft it in advance. It will be pre-written.
The 35,000 are leaving. The 25 richest Americans paid 3.4% on $401 billion in new wealth. The un-billed, again. The gavel does not need to be louder than that.