“[The billionaires] went too far supporting the American Gestapo,” Dunn said. “They went too far actively bowing down to Trump and donating him money for destroying the ballroom, and then there were many, many, many of them directly referenced and associated with [Jeffrey] Epstein and [Ghislaine] Maxwell, child sex traffickers…. They’re not just sitting at a table with an alleged Nazi. They’re sitting at a table with an alleged predator, sex trafficker, and pedophile as well. And the American people do not want that table to exist anymore.”
Diego Marquez, a 38-year-old optician who collects signatures for the proposal near his home in downtown L.A., says a lot of the voters he speaks with also mention Epstein. They want to “screw the billionaires,” he said. “A lot of people are fed up.”
The Teamsters have signed up to support the effort, as has 50501 and the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. The SEIU-UHW has more than 5,000 volunteers collecting signatures and has approved up to $25 million in spending for this and two other ballot measures.
Even many left-wing observers are questioning whether the proposal is a wise policy. A one-time tax on billionaires, of which there are about 200 in the state, isn’t exactly going to solve inequality. “Before this country starts messing around with major wealth taxes (which have a miserable track record in other countries), we ought to tax high incomes—not just billionaires—at a much higher rate, and increase capital gains and corporate tax rates as well. All these income-based taxes stand today at what, historically, are appallingly low levels,” my colleague Timothy Noah wrote in January.
Similarly, the California proposal has gained a formidable opponent in Governor Gavin Newsom. “It’s a badly drafted effort,” he said in January, arguing that it could cost the state revenue over the longer term if the wealthy flee the state over the tax. Some have threatened to do just that, including Peter Thiel, the PayPal founder and Trump supporter, and Google founder Larry Page. In the past, few of the ultra-wealthy have made good on such promises to leave when taxes are raised or politicians promise to raise them, but the threats, along with Newsom’s caution, could give Californians pause. “It’s going to be interesting to see if the moderate position from leaders by Newsom is going to maybe demotivate people,” said Carey Stapleton, a lecturer of computational political science at the University of Massachusetts. “[Voters are] getting inconsistent messages from their party leaders, the people they look up to.”
Opponents have said that a wealth tax, whether it’s one time or long-term, would diminish some of the innovation centered in Silicon Valley by driving out the billionaires who invest in startups in the region now. Representative Ro Khanna, who represents part of Silicon Valley, supports the billionaire tax and is cosponsoring a similar federal tax with Sanders. But supporters of the tax say these concerns are misplaced. “I think if you walk down the dorm halls of Berkeley or Stanford and ask any aspiring entrepreneur, ‘Would you like to make a billion dollars from your startup, but the price is a 1 percent tax to keep California hospitals open, I think every single entrepreneur takes that deal,” said Kris Cuaresma-Primm, who’s worked at Uber and other Silicon Valley startups and is now head of partnerships for the California billionaire Tax Act. “And if we go back in time, I bet the Google founders would have taken that deal too.”
Suzanne Jimenez, chief of staff of the SEIU-UHW, said the goal is “to try to save our health care system and make sure that it’s functional, just until we find a longer term solution.” It became clear that focusing on billionaires, the most fortunate among us in California, paying a very minimal 5 percent one-time tax to just bolster the healthcare system… it just made the most sense.”
The proposal relies on California’s legal definition of residency, which means that if they are “domiciled” in California but leave for a transitory or temporary purpose, they may still count as a resident. Simply buying a second property elsewhere wouldn’t count. “Certainly, a lot of billionaires bought some property in Florida and were reported as maybe leave,” Gamage said. “Whether any of them actually left as a matter of California law, I haven’t seen any critical reports that make me think so. I wouldn’t be surprised if … one or two did…I would be very surprised if it’s a substantial number did.” It’s unclear if any billionaires changed their residency before January 1 in a way that abides by California law, and they’d likely have to prove the change in court.
Anger and populism go hand-in-hand, and it’s been rising on the left for some time—at least since the Great Recession, which took a magnifying glass to the widening economic inequality in America. Ryan Dawkins, an assistant professor of political science at Carleton College in Minnesota, notes that while populist anger on the right today targets markers of social change, like immigration and diversity in public life, the left’s targets are the tightening web of political and financial elites. “There’s just this frustration around affordability ... like we can’t live our lives, like we can’t even pay our bills, and we’re seeing that the top 1 percent ... all the wealth is accumulating to them, and that’s what’s driving this growing inequality,” he said.
The growing inequality and the affordability crisis are stirring an anger that is easily directed at billionaires, and voters might be less concerned about the specifics of the tax than who it’s targeting, Stapleton said. “Most people are not paying attention to politics daily. They’re not thinking about policy every day,” he said. “But then when they see a politician publicly be angry about something, that gives them kind of more time to think about their own anger, which ultimately makes them angrier about things, and then turn out to vote.”
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