Campaigners behind the one-time 5% billionaires wealth tax in California are calling out what they describe as trickery and deception by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, who on Friday released a proposal for a national billionaire’s income tax even as he actively opposes the effort to tax the wealth of billionaires in the state that he and his party currently control.
“Newsom does not want to tax billionaires,” said the Billionaire Tax Now campaign in a statement, “but he wants you to think he does.”
As Common Dreams reported Friday, critics of Newsom warn that the governor thinks “he can fool everyone” with his proposal for a national tax on the income of billionaires while simultaneously opposing a wealth tax headed for a referendum vote in November designed to fill a massive healthcare funding gap in the state created by the budget bill passed by Republicans and signed by President Donald Trump last year.
A national tax ensures billionaires have more difficulty dodging it. A tax in a single state just makes people move to a different state. Tactically, it makes more sense.
They don’t care, they stay anyway. They threaten to leave, but all of the stuff they like is where they’re living now.
That includes the labor and infrastructure that really created their wealth.
Exactly.
They aren’t paying enough, they can leave. They won’t.
That’s like saying your parasites will move to a different body if they can’t suck your blood. Ummmm, okay. Economies are not propped up by billionaires, they succeed in spite of them.
A state bill in California has a much higher chance of passing and much sooner, while a federal bill can still be passed afterward. And those billionaires threatening to move? Some of them might, but many of them won’t.
His proposal isn’t actually a wealth tax though, it’s basically just an income tax only applied to people with billions of dollars in wealth, which means nothing since people at that level of wealth don’t make incomes that can be taxed meaningfully.
It doesn’t matter. It’s a start. We can’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
No, it’s not a start, it’s what we’re currently doing. It’s just a rebranding of the currently non-functional system.
It’s not good, it’s actually deceitful to suggest this nonsense in place of an already compromise solution. An income tax being branded as a wealth tax is just nonsense distraction from people who want the appearance of being progressive without actually supporting anything that might bother their wealthy donors.