Joe Garofoli's column on the Billionaire's Tax is a must-read!
https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/joegarofoli/article/billionaire-tax-california-state-21297701.php
Here are my favorite points:
The proposed tax on California billionaires would affect about 200 people in a state of nearly 40 million.
For the past four decades, it has been hard to persuade the poorest 99% of Americans to raise taxes on the other 1%. Much of that has to do with a federal campaign finance system that allows the wealthiest Americans — and corporations and labor unions — to give unlimited amounts to candidates. As a result, politicians have been too gutless to tax their biggest donors.
In California, many Democrats have couched their opposition by arguing the tax would push wealthy entrepreneurs to leave the state, starving the budget of their businesses’ revenues and thus negating the impact of the tax. Experts, however, say that sort of mass billionaire exodus is unlikely.
Some billionaires, such as Google co-founder Larry Page, did take steps to leave the state before Dec. 31. But some politicians and economists say the billionaires are largely bluffing. Why would they leave? They’ve been making a mint here. A UC Berkeley report on the tax found that “studies of how the super wealthy respond to tax changes find that very few super wealthy residents actually uproot their lives and move due to tax.”
UC Berkeley economics professor Emmanuel Saez, an adviser on the ballot measure who helped design a wealth tax proposal for Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s 2020 presidential campaign, told me: “Billionaires are a group that has done extraordinarily well in California in recent years.” “They have over $2 trillion in wealth as of Jan. 1, 2026,” said Saez. “California billionaire wealth grew 30% in 2025, 40% in 2024, 40% in 2023, hence more than doubling in the last three years.”
Saez noted a crucial provision of the tax that makes the argument over a Great Billionaire Flight of 2026 somewhat moot: The proposal would impose the tax based on residence status on Jan. 1, 2026, meaning it’s already too late to move to avoid it. It’s still possible, though, that some would move out of spite.
Saikat Chakrabarti, a House candidate in San Francisco who is worth an estimated $167 million from his time as a founding engineer at Stripe, said that the “mega-rich won’t even feel a one-time 5% wealth tax. They just got a massive hand-out from Trump.
Et un article précédent souligne que des milliardaires mentent concernant cette proposition de loi:
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