Fleece the rich

I would say this article misses one big point:

Politicians in Annapolis created a millionaire tax bracket, raising the top marginal income-tax rate to 6.25%. And because cities such as Baltimore and Bethesda also impose income taxes, the state-local tax rate can go as high as 9.45%. [...]

One year later, nobody's grinning. One-third of the millionaires have disappeared from Maryland tax rolls. In 2008 roughly 3,000 million-dollar income tax returns were filed by the end of April. This year there were 2,000, which the state comptroller's office concedes is a "substantial decline." On those missing returns, the government collects 6.25% of nothing.

[...] The Maryland state revenue office says it's "way too early" to tell how many millionaires moved out of the state when the tax rates rose. But no one disputes that some rich filers did leave. It's easier than the redistributionists think. Christopher Summers, president of the Maryland Public Policy Institute, notes: "Marylanders with high incomes typically own second homes in tax friendlier states like Florida, Delaware, South Carolina and Virginia. So it's easy for them to change their residency."

This assumes that "the wealthy" are a fixed group of people paying their rich-man's tax year after year, when in fact, in any given year, a large chunk of "the wealthy" tend to be older people selling off their businesses and retiring: farmers selling off their land after 40+ years of farming, hardware store owners passing the business on to someone else, etc.

Lots of people get defined as wealthy for one year of their lives: the year that they change the assets they've created during their working life into retirement cash. If you are going to get fleeced on that sale, you might wait a while to figure out a better way to get your money out of your investment.