Can You Afford to Move Overseas?

A fireside chat about the socialist agenda, the wealth already leaving, and what history says comes next.

I want to set the articles and the statistics aside for a few minutes and just talk with you, the way you’d talk with a friend over a cup of coffee. No debate, no argument to win. Just some things that have been on my mind, and I suspect on yours too.

I’ve spent the last few weeks gathering facts about where a growing movement in this country wants to take us. I’ve read their platform — their own words, published for anyone to see. And I’ll be honest with you: it troubles me. Not in a political way. In a personal way. The way you feel when you sense something changing in a place you love.

The Democratic Socialists of America have written down what they want. Social ownership of key industries — the utilities, the banks, insurance, real estate. Phasing out the police and the prison system entirely. Doing away with the United States Senate and the Electoral College. Even replacing the President and the Supreme Court with committees. And a new constitutional convention to start over on the documents our country was founded on.

Now, I’m not telling you this to alarm you. I’m telling you because it’s written down, and because the people who wrote it are winning elections. They elected the mayor of our largest city. They won three congressional primaries in New York this summer. This isn’t a fringe idea on a college campus anymore. It’s a real movement with real momentum, and I think ordinary folks like you and me deserve to sit with what that means.

Here’s what I keep coming back to. The Constitution, the presidency, the police, the courts, the Senate, the House — these aren’t abstractions to me. They’re the framework of the life we actually live. The reason you can open a business, raise a family, call for help at two in the morning and know somebody’s coming. When a movement talks about dismantling those things, that’s not theory anymore. That touches the way we live, yours and mine.

And it isn’t just people like me saying so. Bill Maher — a liberal his whole life — said just this week that if this is where the Democratic Party is headed, his vote in 2028 is in play. Senator John Fetterman, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, has said plainly that there’s no room for this movement in his party. When thoughtful people on both sides start saying the same thing, I pay attention. I hope you do too.

Let me share what the numbers show, because they tell a quiet story. The IRS tracks where Americans and their income move each year. In the latest data, New York lost almost ten billion dollars in income to people leaving. California lost nearly twelve billion. Florida gained over twenty billion — more than any state in the country — and Texas gained another five and a half. Businesses are making the same journey. Wells Fargo, Elliott Management, Carl Icahn, Chevron, Exxon — household names, moving south, one after another. New York City lost nearly five thousand businesses in a single year, by the city’s own count.

I call it wealth flight. It’s a simple, human thing when you think about it. When people feel that the taxes and the fees are only going up, and that the promises being funded with their money can never be kept, they don’t stand and argue. They quietly pack up and go somewhere that still wants them. Even the governor of New York — a Democrat — admitted this spring that her state’s tax base has been eroded, and said maybe the first step is to go down to Palm Beach and try to bring some of those folks back home. I don’t say that to score a point on her. I say it because when the people in charge start asking the wealthy to please come back, that tells you the story is real.

And history tells us how this story ends. It has been tried, sincerely and repeatedly, in country after country. It has never worked. Not once. The money runs out, the promises collapse, and it’s never the powerful who pay the price. It’s the ordinary family. Every time.

Here’s the other thing weighing on me. America is 350 million people, and there is so much honest work waiting to be done. Lowering medical costs — which I truly believe is within reach if we ever clear the middlemen and the lobbyists out of the system and let families see what things actually cost. Real problems, with real solutions, sitting untouched. Congress simply is not doing its job. And meanwhile, so much of the energy in our politics is going toward tearing down instead of fixing. That saddens me more than it angers me. We’re better than this, and we know it.

If the direction this movement wants takes hold, I believe it will fail — and when it fails, every single American will feel it. That is, every American who remains in this country.

And that brings me to the question I really wanted to talk with you about.

I asked myself something honestly the other day: if it came to it, could I live in another country? Anyone who knows me already knows the answer is yes. I’ve worked hard for a long time, and I have options. So do the folks buying homes in Palm Beach and signing leases in Dallas. The wealthy always have options. That’s exactly what all those IRS numbers are telling us — when things go wrong, wealth can leave.

But here’s the question I’d gently put to you, friend to friend: can you afford to move overseas?

For most hardworking families, the honest answer is no. And that means you and yours are the ones who would live with whatever gets built here — good or bad. The people making these promises can afford to be wrong. Most of us can’t. That’s not a slogan. That’s just the truth of it, and it’s why this matters so much more to the man working a shift and raising his kids than it does to anyone on a stage.

I’m not going anywhere, by the way. This is my country, and I love it too much to leave it or to stay quiet about it. I just believe the most patriotic thing any of us can do right now is to look clearly at what’s being proposed, in the proposers’ own words, and ask ourselves honestly whether that’s the country we want to hand our children.

Thanks for sitting with me a while. Talk it over at your dinner table. That’s where this country has always done its best thinking.

© 2026 Mike Morrison. All rights reserved.