• For California’s next trick, I’d like to put the abolishment of tech moguls on the ballot.

    If this is too extreme, then I’m okay with bringing back “the stocks”, so long as we get to throw tomatoes at them.

  • Oh no, but the billionaires might leave the state! That would be a shame, not to have them assfucking our politicians. A damn shame.

    • 51 minutes

      They would still assfuck your politicians. Elon Musk spent $90 million on a judge race in Wisconsin.

    • 41 seconds

      Every state where, “the money goblins will leave if X!!!” is threatened, that state ends up having more millionaire/billionaires after X happens.

      And when they “leave” they don’t leave, they buy another vacation home, their business interests stay put.

      And of course, wherever they are, they aren’t paying taxes. And you are paying their energy /water bills.

    • 2 hours

      They seem to be moving to the Midwest lately anyway. To states where they can fuck over the environment with their data centers. But if they think they will move the entire business, including employees, there, I’m not so sure that will work out. The local yokels are fucked from decades of poor education, so they don’t have the tech skills. They will have a hard time importing brown people on H1B visas, because everyone in these states is racist as fuck (which is also why they moved there to begin with.) So that leaves US citizens with those skill sets, but they mostly live in blue areas and are not going to want to move to these places that won’t align with their lifestyle. So they’ll still have to have remote employees, or they think they can get rid of most of their employees and replace them all with their AI jizz fest. Which will be funny when it fails.

  • Why would the billionaires pay 5% when they can spend less then 1% flooding the tvs and mailboxes of Californiana with ads that this will destroy the economy?

    • 7 hours

      Tax the ever living fuck out of them like they did pre-Reagan.

      • Yeah, a 95% marginal tax rate and both a massive inheritance and transfer of assets while alive (not sure how it’s called) taxes would solve most of the problem.

        • 35 minutes

          taxing inheritence and transfer of assets

          Wouldn’t happen in CA. As blue as they seem, prop 13 makes them basically a feudal society with actual landed gentry. I’m not making that up.

        • (not sure how it’s called)

          I think you are looking for “wealth tax”

          Also the US has inheritance tax that kicks in once an estate exceeds 5million dollars. The problem is that you can bypass that limit by establishing a trust that holds all your assets. If before your death you put everything over 5million in a trust (baisically a legal contract that acts like a container for assets that a lawyer oversees to make sure the contract is executed) then it stops being your wealth and starts being the trust’s wealth. A trust can have any arbitrary set of rules, for example it could be as simple as: wisely invest my assets and pay out an income to my surviving decendants from the intrest and their decendants. Or ot could be: while i live pay me out, on my death distribute everything left to charities my children are ungreatful brats and don’t get anything. Really it can be anything.

          Those are really useful if for example you have 3 unmarried adults who want to share property and make sure property rights transfer between them until everyone is dead then the trust is disolved and the property goes to: favorite niece or something. It can also be useful to allow joint ownership of regulated items that otherwise can’t be jointly owned (e.g. machine guns) they are also more powerful than a will if for example you want to make sure your grandkids get college money, or dont get any money until 25, while their parents get nothing and so on… anything you can put on a contract can rule the trusts assets.

          So realistically the solution here is to cap how much value can be in a trust, say 5million dollars, and limit how many trusts an individual can be a benneficiary of, lets say 3 trusts at a time.

    • 6 hours

      It almost looks like it‘s designed to fail. Probably all of those billionaires will be richer by the end of the year this tax comes into effect. Meanwhile the money raised from it won‘t be enough to solve all that many issues. It‘s not really supposed to but billionaires and their outlets will keep telling us how „taxing the rich was tried and failed!!!“ Mark my words.

    • I was going to answer how taxing income instead of assets is more effective because it emphasizes reinvesting and creating jobs. But billionaires shouldnt exist. Its just too much accumulated in one person.

      • At the very minimum, a 2% worldwide annual tax to prevent some tax evasion.

        • 6 hours

          At 2% it would hurt those who hold bonds at 3.9% (and below) and when there is a planned 2% inflation rate. (The economy is usually better for the working class when bonds average between 2-5% returns).

          But I agree that it should be global.

            • 58 minutes

              Or more.

              But you do realize that the billionaires are going to try to poison pill any such legislation by making it apply to everyone.

              • 36 minutes

                Yes, I am well aware that the only path forward is playing mario brothers multiplayer, we can do it.

                • 27 minutes

                  It would be easier if the location of bowser was tracked on some map (ideally realtime) so that players could speedrun to their boss fight.

          • The 2% would be applied to households worth 100 million dollars or more, I’m pretty sure they could spare the change without much impact on their lifestyles.

            • 4 hours

              Why not make it go, 1%, 2%,4%,8%,16%,32%,64% based on how much they had? Hurting the trillionaire and the centibillionaires the hardest

              • The goal is to have it low enough so that every single country in the world agrees to set it up, even tax havens like Bermuda, Luxembourg or Monaco. But high enough to be effective. Then, once it’s agreed upon, we can make it better and more progressive.

    • You still have that population who believe they’ll become millionaires some day if they work hard so 5% is small enough that they might actually vote in favor

        • Id guess those same ppl think they could possibly become a billionaire too. If youre going to be delusional you might as well cross the line into stupidity

    • During a talk at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in April, he said: “I say to everybody: ‘Move to California. Don’t leave.’ It’s the highest taxes in the world, but it’s OK.”

      From the article

      • 2 hours

        The full quote, since you left out some relevant details like who “he” is:

        Notably, Jensen Huang, the billionaire CEO of Nvidia, has said he’s fine with the proposed tax and that he chose to live in Silicon Valley. During a talk at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in April, he said: “I say to everybody: ‘Move to California. Don’t leave.’ It’s the highest taxes in the world, but it’s OK.”