This confuses marginal tax for effective tax. If you move to NYC and make $500k, your marginal tax will be pretty high (~48% between Federal, State, and Local,

This confuses marginal tax for effective tax. If you move to NYC and make $500k, your marginal tax will be pretty high (~48% between Federal, State, and Local, 1.45% for Medicare, a little over 1% for SS due to the cap at ~100k.) So your marginal tax rate is around 50% (high, but still a far cry from 87%). His blurb about dividends makes no sense at all because they don't get taxed when you buy the shares, only when you receive income, meaning they don't increase your marginal tax when you're already in the top bracket. But even after all that your effective tax rate something like 6% lower. So you're paying about half of 87%, and you're in the highest earning 0.5% of the nation. And that is, of course, all assuming no deductions, which is also unrealistic.