Rumors that Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos has been pushing the Post in a more commonsensical editorial direction could very well be true.
A recent Post editorial slams progressives who “think of taxation the way teenage boys think about cologne: if some is good, more must be great.”
I’m no fan of even a moderate amount of that brand of cologne. But anyway. The Post is discussing a proposed ballot measure backed by the ultra-lefty Service Employees International Union.
SEIU troops are currently collecting signatures. And before they’ve even gotten enough to post it to ballot, the people being targeted have started moving.
Out of state.
The measure would impose a new 5 percent tax on billionaires. Some of the state’s billionaires, including Google cofounder Larry Page and Palantir cofounder Peter Thiel, aren’t willing to wait and see whether it actually reaches the ballot and passes in November. Why? The measure would apply retroactively “to those who were California residents on January 1, 2026.”
Some Democratic lawmakers are saying “good riddance,” as if it’s possible to loot billionaires who don’t wait around to be looted. Or that it’s good for state coffers to lose their billionaire entrepreneur “contributors.”
The Post says the retroactivity would open the measure to legal challenges, but that if it gets passed and survives litigation, “it’s a safe bet this won’t be a one-off. Funding ongoing expenses like health care with one-time taxes isn’t sustainable. Progressives will want to return to the well until they’ve sucked it dry.”
And no one should know better than Californians how dangerous dry wells are.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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3 replies on “Post California Soaking”
The Democrats of California, of Illinois, of New York, of Oregon, and of Washington are generally aware of what they are doing. Given a choice of being some of the smaller fish in a large and healthy pond, or being the biggest fish in a small and fouled pond, the Democrats choose the latter.
The degradation of a community in the displacement of opponents is known as “the Curley Effect”, after James Michael Curley, who greatly damaged Boston, in a way that disproportionately drove-out the people who opposed him and opposed the Democratic Party. The last time that Boston had a mayor of a different party was in 1930, almost a century ago.
Many of the looters expect enough loot to last them for life-times; but, if that proves not to be true, they can just relocate, and start the looting anew in some other part of America.
Most of the people now-a-days fleeing places such as California don’t really get what has gone wrong; they imagine that things went too fast, and maybe even too far, but they still think that some amount of socialism, perhaps even increasing at some rate, makes perfect sense. They’ll be ready to try again in some new location — hijacking the resources of their neighbors — in the hope that This Time Can Be Different™.
How does the SEIU determine who is a ‘billionaire’? Not all assets are liquid. Do they tax cash assets only? How can they tax people who might have a second home in CA but have sizable assets in other states? They may be billionaires but CA is not entitled to tax their assets in other states, regardless of whether the law is retroactive or not.
Pat, unfortunately, the propose tax is a tax on wealth, whether liquid or not; and the state was long ago granted the power to claim to know the values of assets. Moreover, constituent states have long been allowed to levy taxes on things beyond their borders, as when people who live in one state but work in another end-up paying income taxes to each state, and corporate income is taxed based upon world income.
Here’s an especially sick twist to the whole business: As things now stand, billionaires would have to liquidate assets to pay the proposed tax, and when they liquidated the assets, the holders would also have to pay capital gains taxes. If any billionaires were still in California later, they would of course keep more cash on hand in order to pay these taxes, which would mean that they would be hoarding cash. While hoarding cash does not produce some of the costs that clowns imagine, the fact remains that some of the very most able investors will be doing significantly less investing.
The left does not understand that rentiers are not mere parasites, so the left will not understand the loss. Some on the left will concoct theories that the departed capitalists are pulling strings to hold-down the California economy, so that they can return to parasitize it.