Let me start with the end.

> This idea that "only the wealthy" (how is this even defined??)

I don't know how OP defines "wealthy", but I define wealthy to start around 3 to 10 million dollars. This is due to the Trinity Study[1], which showed that withdrawing 4% of your portfolio every year gives you a 96% chance to not run out of money during a 30 year period. Therefore, a portfolio of 3 million dollars gives you a salary of 120,000 for no work. If you're willing to live anywhere other than the center of a large tech hub, 120,000 dollars is an incredible amount of money. I live in a city in Iowa, and you could live pretty comfortably with half of that, meaning your safe withdrawal rate is probably 2% instead.

I give an upper range of 10 million as a little leeway in case of extreme circumstances, or the SWR changing dramatically.

Of course, this definition of wealth is not the sort of wealth that Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates has. I think there's a distinction between personal wealth, i.e. to live your life without any worries about money, and the political wealth that billionaires have to control entire countries. I just think that my definition is the useful one for this point. My definition also does not include income, which I think is an important part of what it means to be wealthy. My impression is that income could only include more people, rather than exclude people, because people with 3-10 million dollars have an amount of income by default, via their investments.

> It turns out jobs happen to exist in cities throughout the country. Almost all of them in fact.

There is so much more risk in moving for a job than just not being able to find a job. Firstly, the relocation expenses. First and last months rent, security deposits, truck/trailer rentals, gas, food, travel expenses, moving crews, insurance for the moving crew, temporary housing while moving, utility hookups, storage costs, spousal employment assistance, and loss-on-sale allowances for your previous home. I can't find any non-paywalled studies for estimates for the cost of all this, but from the research I've done on the internet, the minimum cost to move is around $1,250 to $5,000, on local vs cross-country moves. That is only for the cost of moving itself, and not on the lost revenue from not working.

> Families are also able to move as a unit if so desired.

Not always. What about families who are not in a single home? For example, a family could have a grandma that lives in a nearby retirement home. Not only may that grandma not know how to use a widely available resource, but what about for all the things that can't be done online?

Another issue is that a good proportion of Americans are relying on their families skills and finances. As according to [2], 12% of Americans cannot afford a $400 emergency bill. That means that when your car breaks down, you can't afford to go see a mechanic. If you're part of that 12%, you first take it to your aunt/uncle/grandma/grandpa/family friend, so they can look at it for no cost. If you live somewhere else you can't do that.

A final issue is the non-financial issues related to moving a family. There are multitudes of studies showing decreased well-being in children who move during childhood. Here's [3] for an example of one.

>It should also be noted that this already happens today and not so much so be the wealthy for whom moving actually is much less important. Take a look at net migration stats throughout the country: https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2017/demo/geographic-mobi....

I agree that, for the wealthy, moving is much less important. You have infinitely more resources to do it with, and furthermore, you have infinitely more resources to make your current situation livable. I'm not sure how this connects to your overall point though. I also downloaded the net migration stats, but I have no idea what they're supposed to mean in context.

> This idea that "only the wealthy" (how is this even defined??) have the autonomy to do anything is so played out in today's political discussions. It's a trope used without thought to the idea being proposed. No consideration given except that something might cost money and is therefore only doable by some abstract group of wealthy people.

Maybe it is a tired trope in political discussions, and that people are saying things without actually quoting the research. That's happening on all sides of any political discussion. But actually doing so is almost never worth the effort. To take a quote from Alberto Brandolini, "The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it". In a prisoner's dilemma sense, it seems better to reply to bullshit with more bullshit. At least then you can match the volume.

[1] http://www.retailinvestor.org/pdf/Bengen1.pdf
[2] https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/2018-repor...
[3] https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2010/06/moving-well-...