The Billionaire Tax debate needs a reality check

The “billionaire tax” has qualified for the ballot, according to the union organizers who launched it. It may lose in November. It may be thrown out by the courts. 

It is already hurting California.

Almost as soon as the SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West launched its signature drive, many of the state’s billionaires moved out of California.

It wasn’t hard for them. Most already owned real estate in other states, or had business interests there — states like Texas and Florida (which manage to provide for residents without an income tax, let alone a seizure of wealth).

Trillions in wealth left California. And billions of dollars in future income, which will no longer fill our state’s coffers, to be used (we are told) for essential public services, especially for the poor.

Here’s something many people don’t know. Billionaires are already taxed in California — highly.

The top 1% of earners in California pay almost 50% of the income tax for the entire state — which depends on income taxes for its budget.

Kimberly White

Bernie Sanders — who is not from California — likes to say billionaires should pay their “fair share.” 

Well, if we were to charge billionaires their “fair share,” they’d get a massive tax cut.

There’s a sinister side to the billionaire tax — a resentment of success and of wealth, which is entirely foreign to California.

Small wonder that the “billionaire tax” is not originally a local idea. It is imported from Europe, via UC Berkeley.

Two economists in particular helped inspire it. One is Emmanuel Saez; the other is Gabriel Zucman.

Both are originally from France — a nice place to visit, but not exactly a paragon of prosperity.

For decades, France had a version of the billionaire tax. Called the “solidarity tax,” it targeted a wider range of wealthy people — those with assets greater than 1.3 million Euros.

Wealthy people simply left the country — by the tens of thousands. 

In 2018, French President Emmanuel Macron repealed the tax. 

That hasn’t deterred the far-left — nor SEIU leader Dave Regan, who dragged California into a fight that many fellow union leaders quietly didn’t want.

Roger Askew/The Oxford Union/Shutterstock

Regan arrived from the post-industrial Rust Belt and apparently decided that what California needed was more of the misery that many once moved west to escape.

The next step will be to tax the wealth of the middle class — and even that won’t be enough to pay for the ballooning cost of public health care.

Chasing away billionaires who invest and create jobs will make things even harder for middle-class Californians, more of whom will have to leave to find opportunities elsewhere.

A smarter approach would do two things. 

First, we should look for ways to cut the costs of health care. That means fighting the lawyers and other entrenched special interests.

Second, instead of taking away the wealth of billionaires, we should be trying to make more of them — and to keep them here.

The more people know about the “billionaire tax,” the less they like it.

Now is the time to lay the facts before the voters — before it is too late.

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