>there is zero evidence that this has any deterrent effect on wealthy people settling in Switzerland or startups being created in Switzerland Got a peer-review

>there is zero evidence that this has any deterrent effect on wealthy people settling in Switzerland or startups being created in Switzerland Got a peer-reviewed citation that there is zero evidence? Or is that your opinion? Here's some evidence on Swiss rich mobility [1]: ".. tax records of two cantons with quasi-randomly assigned differential tax reforms suggest that 24% of the effect arise from taxpayer mobility .." [4] Taxpayer mobility.... means rich people moving for tax reasons, correct? Many countries had a wealth tax; almost all of them dropped it because it did cause capital flight and didn't generate much revenue compared to the costs. Switzerland was late to that party, and will likely drop theirs for the same reasons. Here's but one paper on the actual effects of the Switzerland wealth tax: [1] "We estimate that a 0.1 percentage-point rise in wealth taxation lowers reported wealth by 3.5% in aggregate. Expressed relative to taxable capital income flows, this implies a net-of-tax elasticity of roughly 1.2, which is large compared to the elasticities typically estimated in the income literature. The elasticity of tax revenues with respect to tax rates is only -0.2" So you see it's already pushing wealth out of the tax base. As to where wealthy people settle, look for the papers on wealthy moving between Swiss cantons to get the best tax advantage (the tax rates are by canton). So there is absolutely evidence of rich moving to take better tax advantage. >Wealth taxes and their effect have been studied quite a bit in economics literature, and there are various peer-reviewed papers that attempt to measure the effects, but the Silicon Valley crowd is strangely avoidant of examining evidence or explaining their opposition with real-world data Yes, there is ample economic evidence. It's odd that those pushing for one in the US ignore the past case evidence. For example, [2] shows that a wealth tax does lower entrepreneurship, in [3] Stiglitz shows that a wealth tax does have a negative effect on investment and increased risk-aversion..... Google scholar has lots of papers on what happened to countries that implemented such taxes, and why those taxes got dropped. [1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w22376 https://www.nber.org/papers/w22376 [2] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/097135570801700203 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/097135570801700... [3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780127808505500290 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B978012780... [4] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3471248 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3471248