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How many people in the upper 1% do you know?

At the $300,000 threshold or so? A few. About as many as I know who are expatriates. Frankly, if I had to bet, I'd say that a lot less than 1% of the expatriates would be high-income taxpayers if they were still in the US. Mostly they leave to live where a modest retirement income provides a fairly nice standard of living.

However, even if you assume that the percentage of high-income taxpayers (top 1%) is proportionally much higher among expatriates - say, 10% - it would take 40 years for all the top 1% to leave, by which time they'd all have died off. And yes, that's the point. 'Members' of the top 1% of taxpayers are 'leaving' all the time. They die off. And, just like happens all the time now, if they leave, others will flood into the resulting opportunities to become the next batch of top 1% taxpayers.

Remember, I hate income taxes as much as the guy who wrote this article. But his assumption that 100% of the top 1% will leave, taking 100% of their income with them so that the rest have to make up the lost taxes without any increase in income - all that is just bogus.