Maybe it is that group that has the most common sense to realize that the tax code should not be spiteful in nature and used as a money grab by politicians who can't control their own spending?

Maybe they're historically literate enough to know that's how the income tax was sold to the public too. It was only supposed to be on the top 1% or earners. How's that working out for you?

This is how you know the US has lost the class war. Or won, depending on your point of view. Not only do the billionaires have free rein (and reign) to do whatever they want to the country and it's people, but the very same country and people, at their own peril, will stop at nothing to defend and advance that rein.

This is just property confiscation, I understand that poorer people do not care about wealthier people paying anything, that's how taxes and subsidies are pushed through in the first place. However call it what it is - it is confiscation of private property. As a side note, the so called 'income tax' also started as a wealthy people's tax. It was 1% and it was only applicable to a small fraction of the population who were earning over 3000 dollars a year or so and 6% of additional tax on incomes above 5

Nobody with that income can even survive in this state. But don't worry, you can be confident that there's nothing wrong with this state. Nothing at all. It's not being poorly managed. Any possible problems are all caused by republicans, unnamed billionaires, Elon, maga, and fascism. Pay no attention to the local elected officials behind the curtain. This frog is not boiling.

$30K people play the lottery and think they could win, so they worry that this would apply to them.

You don't earn $30K a year being smart...

When you have that much money it's not money anymore, it's power.

I don't like having a Epstein class. Maybe you do, but you're gonna need to explain to me why.

> One time? Right! Once the money is gone the desire to rinse and repeat will be irresistible.

What gets me is the proponents want to use the one-time windfall to fund things like child healthcare. But won't we have to fund child healthcare next year too? What was the plan for that?

It's a stupid idea every way you look at it.

Not only is an easy change to more than once already built into the bill- it can be done without a vote - they've also built in the means to expand it past billionaires.

"50310. Legislative Authority. The Legislature may amend the 2026 Billionaire Tax Act, by statute passed in each house of the Legislature by rollcall vote entered in the journal, two-thirds of the membership concurring, if the statute is consistent with and furthers the purposes of the 2026 Billionaire Tax Act"

Feel like applying to those who

The One Time is real in that it is not a yearly tax repeated. It discourages billionaires from leaving because of the tax.

Say you are tight and do not trust them not to repeat it. That means:

1) They would have a ton more data. How much money raised and how many billionaires left the state after the first one, letting them calculate was it 'worth it', and tell them whether it it is worth it again - with the added knowledge that it would probably drive more billionaires out the 2nd time as this this would

> What happens if someone has $1B in net worth but doesn't have the liquidity to pay the tax? Will they be forced to sell assets - perhaps even at a loss - to pay the bill? Will they have to sell part of the company they may have created?

#firstworldproblems

Yes.

And if something has a paper value $1B today and you get taxed on it, but there's a market correction and its value drops to $500M? Do you get part of your tax payment back?

Yes. But, not only do they need to sell assets/shares to pay the wealth tax, they would also need to sell assets/shares to pay federal and state income tax on any capital gains.

It'll spread downward pressure on assets that person held and destroy a lot more wealth than they will pay in taxes. This is what will ultimately wake everyone up to the danger of wealth taxes: liquidity issues.

Personally, I would agree with you entirely.

Now, everyone has their own preference on what a "simplified" tax code would look like.

For myself, I'd use something similar to an S-curve. Maybe even use that family of curves directly. What you want is for those who earn very little to pay very little, for there to be a region where this increases substantially (because life ain't cheap, even when you can use scale efficiencies meaningfully), and for an asymptotic region for the mega-wealthy. You feed in the exp

You definitely should pay more marginal tax as you make more money, up to some point. The first $10 or $20k you make should be tax-free, and then the tax rate should become progressively higher after that, but should max out around 30% or so. But that's only 30% of income, not 30% of net assets. Taxing assets is theft. Taxing income is progressive.

However, the accumulation of wealth into the hands of people who make good investments (i.e. making good choices of what to spend it on so that they invest in

Because people have been demanding the loopholes be closed and the tax code simplified for decades, and it hasn't worked. You can debate why it hasn't worked, but at some point calling for the same thing that has never worked despite many attempts at it... Well, it doesn't seem like a great strategy.

You might want to look at who is leading the calls for closing loopholes and simplifying tax. It tends to be the ones who for some reason get even richer whenever it is tried.

> Billionaire's 5% asset tax(asset seizure) today. Middle class retirement account 5% asset tax(asset seizure) tomorrow!

What middle class?

A massive amount of people who support wealth taxes, in California or otherwise, think that when someone is a millionaire or billionaire that means one thing only: they have a bank account with that amount of money just sitting there. Being used to buy stuff in the way they use their bank account. Of course that is in 0% of the cases.

I think the biggest technical problem is that I don't think people with that kind of "net worth" really personally own what gives them that worth. There's already a lot of incentives to not have assets in your name (protecting against lawsuits, divorce, etc.), so how many of these billionaires are actually penniless in a legal sense?

Basically, you could have billions in a checking account owned by a trust, and just be an "authorized user" on a credit card that some lawyer trustee pays off from the trust. Co

> Billionaires shouldn't exist, they're a runaway condition in our economic system that should be corrected.

A million is more than enough. And a new car should only cost [1]$260 [detroithistorical.org]. Fix that problem and then we'll talk*.

*Enjoy your $5 per day wages. And don't complain. The average worker should earn 22 cents per hour.

[1] https://www.detroithistorical.org/learn/online-research/encyclopedia-of-detroit/model-t

Let them flee. The rich do not provide any benefits. The rich do not pay their fair share of anything. The rich do not help the economy. The rich do not earn money, they take money.

Cutting budgets doesn't work. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_experiment

Just one more tax, bro! One more tax will finally fix everything.

What you're saying about "just the rich" doesn't align with the facts. In California, about a third of the people who file returns, mostly non-rich people, don't pay state income tax.

> Taxes are regressive. All of them.

No...that's absolutely false. Consumption taxes are regressive. Wealth and income taxes are progressive taxes. When done intelligently, they're very beneficial. I don't think we do a good job here in the USA, though. I don't like this California tax because it is pretty high and one-time. It's easy to just move out of the state for a year and come back...Also, 5% is pretty high in my opinion.

However, take the estate tax. How have you benefited?...if you don't come from money, you haven't. But the wealthy did and now have more incentive to hoard their wealth rather than give to charity. Now they have more incentive to bribe politicians to keep the taxes in their bracket low.

In particular, look at Musk. Beside the fact that he's a drug addicted Nazi, piece of shit, he effectively bought the 2024 election. Without the bush era tax cuts and rollback of campaign finance reforms, I don't think that would have happened. Kamela fucked up the election regardless, but Trump would have had far less of an funding advantage and would have to rely on getting votes more than courting billionaires to win. Without Musk, if Trump didn't lose outright, the margins would have been much closer. He certainly couldn't have afforded as many attack ads as he ran.

Even if you like Trump and are his biggest fan, which if you make a comment that stupid, I am sure you are....just remember, this can work in reverse...George Soros, or whichever liberal boogeyman you want to obsess about can do the same and fun whichever candidate on whichever level....mostly because of all the vast wealth they've gained from Republican tax credits...while you get little benefit. Your taxes barely lowered, but theirs did...and you suffer the effects of reduced funding of the police and schools in your neighborhood...they barely do...they can afford private schools and security and private jets.

It's no coincidence that the USA's periods of highest prosperity were those with high taxes and a strong central government and our periods of the greatest poverty and despair had very low taxes and all-powerful oligarchs...from the guilded age to big tech celebrities today.

When done correctly, taxes are great....they're an investment in a country and it's future...when done poorly, they cause the problems you describe. Again, I don't think the CA tax is a good idea, but we definitely need to rollback pretty much every Republican tax cut in the last 30 years as they pretty much only benefit the ultra-wealthy and screw over the rest of us.

We need more in the middle class and a stable economy, not more billionaires profiting off the decline of our country.

> Which is exactly what they said a hundred years ago when they instituted the "income tax".

> Rich people will move out. And take their wealth with them.

> Taxes are regressive. All of them.

What tax free libertarian utopia are you currently residing in?

Except, a hundred years ago, they didn't. And the government knows this. As do many in the public. The taxes in the 1960s and 70s were around 90% for the rich, not 5%, and yet billionaires stayed in America.

You can hate taxes all you like, but even with posting, you're using services that were invented because those taxes existed and for no other reason. The commercial sector FAR preferred the X.25 technology they were using, because they could charge a fortune and get away with it. You have Internet today

Odd how we can stop the wealth from leaving the country, but not from leaving the state.

When the top ten billionaires have to sell their shares of apple to pay the tax man, it's also your mutual funds and retirement accounts that take the hit on the value as well. When it comes time to pay the tax man, billionaires will have to sell assets to pay the bill. That selling will massively dislocate the markets. Even if only the top 1% of holders have to sell in order to make it happen. Just watch and see. This will be educational.

For some reason, people never seem to have trouble using 'current stock market valuations' to secure loans and credit, so.....

Yep. America is dying because the red states will do anything but carry their own load. Blue states not only have to subsidize them, but also provide food and medical care to their residents who flee. Around 25% of our homeless population in California moved here after becoming homeless because they could not survive in their home states, even while those states spend our money. They cannot even meet their monetary needs on a year to year basis by selling out the future, but they still get an outsized say in what happens in our country because of the electoral college, which was created specifically to give slave states outsized voting power.

The UK recently did this, and it worked really well. Raised £30 billion so far. Strangely, despite dire warnings and threats, all the ultra wealthy did not in fact move to Dubai or have their superhuman accountants avoid paying anything.

Turns out we aren't just a convenient tax jurisdiction after all. There are other reasons for the mega rich to stay in the UK. To be fair I wouldn't, but some people seem to like it.

> These are a couple ways a wealth tax could go very wrong, but there are so many more.

The obvious failure here is not taking enough. 5%? That's nowhere near the percentage of their wealth they got by fucking everyone else over.