Dan’s exactly right that Jeff Bezos did the smart thing by moving out of Washington. The state passed a new (unconstitutional) wealth tax to target its wealthiest residents. Bezos is one of the wealthiest people in the world, and he was on the hook for a big chunk of the tax’s projected revenue. As Jared Walczak of the Tax Foundation writes:

The state’s economists projected that the wealth tax would raise about $3.2 billion a year once implemented. This estimate included assumptions that some share of high-net-worth households would move to avoid the tax, but a Bezos move is going to be particularly hard for the state to stomach. Based on his current net worth, which is mostly in publicly reported ownership of Amazon shares, Bezos would have been on the hook for about $1.44 billion a year under the proposed wealth tax—a full 45 percent of the projected total.

This is, from a revenue perspective, one of the biggest problems with wealth taxes. They rely on such a tiny sliver of the population that even minor changes — in this case, one (1) person’s moving to a different state — can have large effects.

By the way, Walczak also notes, “While Bezos may not be thinking about this yet, by moving to Florida, he also shields his heirs from Washington’s highest-in-the-nation estate tax, with a top rate of 20 percent.”