Actually, the gold reserves and and immigrant thing had way bigger campaigns for them than against them. If anything, the vote was for whoever had the least money behind their campaign.

The tax thing is annoying. I would have hoped for a yes vote (and I have voted yes), but I think this is still a few years off before we'll see a change there.

I heard something on the news just today about how Geneva got rid of these tax advantages and basically half of the affected people moved out of Geneva right after. Maybe people think the same would happen on a national level?

I don't necessarily think this would be the result, but I can see a lot of people thinking that.

I think you mean Zurich, not Geneva, see http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/cantons-weigh-up-value-of-lump-s...

The article is well written but I'll pull out probably the most important stat: of the canton’s 201 former lump sum beneficiaries, 97 left, amounting to loss of CHF 12.2 million in cantonal tax receipts (avg CHF 126k per person).

What about the stat found in the next paragraph:

This left over 100 wealthy foreigners remaining in the canton. Depending on how much wealth they had and how it was distributed, 55 ended up paying more tax and 47 less. Their total cantonal tax bill of CHF13.8 million more than made up for the losses, so the canton did better than break even.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think Zurich was particularly hurting for losing the CHF 12 million in the first place. It's not that much money for a jurisdiction of rather affluent 1.4 million people. That they made more is bonus.

I assume there are real inertia issues with moving, probably where with step functions at certain levels of wealth.

Moving at all has inertia, moving to a new city in the same country has a lot more but I suspect moving internationally has the greatest. And the Swiss are a rarity in that they are one of few countries where native speakers can go to nearby countries and still be (mostly) understood.

So it's worth discounting the "if we raise taxes they will all leave" theory for my money

Rich people can often find ways to officially move for tax purposes.

What's the advantage of a ton of wealthy people moving away from Geneva?

It was Zurich, not Geneva, and the (now regular, and thus higher) taxes paid by those who stayed did compensate those who left. The advantage is that ordinary people may be more willing to pay their regular taxes if the rich are paying theirs, too.

I guess it depends on how you look at it.

Taxes levied do not always equal the complete value to the economy of a country. While they might have been paying lower taxes, who says they weren't consuming/spending more? The cars they bought, the restaurants they visited, or the expensive suits they had tailored/made - those all add to the local economy. And those 'profits' are then also taxed, either at the corporate level (i.e. the restaurant) or at the personal level (i.e. someone employed at the restaurant).

Also, this said, there is only so much one can consume. A wealthy person might have 1000 or 10,000 times more wealth than an average person, but he doesn't have 1000 cars. Or suits. I would expect it to be better to have more wealthy people in an area, rather than less, even if the tax income is the same, because as a group they consume and invest more.

> While they might have been paying lower taxes, who says they weren't consuming/spending more?

Economists do measure the "velocity of money". And it really is higher among the poor, for common-sense reasons; someone who's living paycheck to paycheck is (almost by definition) spending all of their income, putting it straight back into circulation, whereas the wealthy are more likely to save some (which yes does recirculate as investment to an extent, but the investor as rentier takes their cut, and investment income is often undertaxed), spend some abroad, or spend in less efficient industries (e.g. high-end handcrafted anything, where you're paying a master craftsman who won't actually spend a lot of their time producing things, and won't be pulling back anywhere near as much through the productive economy (e.g. buying materials) compared to the same amount of money spent on mass-produced goods).

Better parking !

The not so wealthy that stay there get to start business on a level playing field, instead of having unfair competition from the wealthy ones.

I don't think this is correct. More than 90% of the advertisements in newspapers were against, for each of the three proposals. Source: http://www.50plus1.ch/?p=547 (German, French version at bottom)

Most popular initiatives in Switzerland are rejected. It's quite easy to bring an initiative to referendum here so you get a lot of quite extreme proposals from minority segments of society. The federal government always provides a recommendation on how to vote and it of course mostly recommends voting against (if the government was for a thing, it wouldn't need to come to referendum anyway normally). And I guess here people trust the local government a lot more than in other parts of the world, so those recommendations carry a fair bit of weight.

It's not easy at all. 100'000 valid signatures might not sound that challenging – until you have to collect them yourself!

Alright, let me clarify. It's quite easy compared to most countries.

An alternative explanation is that they (or maybe 'we'..) voted to preserve the statu quo. A quick look through historical vocation results will tell you that this is as strong a predictor as it gets.

This is just a myth. Take the swiss immigration referendum from 9.2.2014. It was broadly and prominently combated. Most of the parties were against it and all economic associations threw in tons of money against it. Still, the Swiss voted for it.

Why would they want to increase Gold reserves anyway? Surely holding strategic foreign currency reserves is broadly more useful.

Because gold bugs and fiat money.

Gold bugs are kind of the more conservative variant of Bitcoin fans.

Might make the fiscal luddites shut up for a while? Not sure it'd actually be worth the cost though.

Because hoarding a nearly worthless mineral makes some people sleep better at night.

It was an initiative motivated by FUD and protectionism.

Because gold can't be printed ad infinitum like the central banks can and do with currency.

E.g If you hold Japanese yens and the Bank of Japan announces it is printing like crazy like they did recently, and the currency falls 20% in one year, you loose 20% of your reserves.

Useful for what? For Bankruptcy?

Today all central banks are printing like crazy, so it is a good idea to hold real things.