cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/54152859
Proposition 40, which would impose a one-time 5% tax on California billionaires to help fund healthcare, appeared headed for defeat, though votes were still being counted.
Opponents raised hundreds of millions of dollars to fight the measure, far outspending supporters, who argued the tax could help offset federal healthcare cuts.
The campaign also faced opposition from Gov. Gavin Newsom, teachers, business groups and others, while voters weighed concerns about taxing assets and the possibility that billionaires could leave California.
There’s a reason USA has become a shithole, and that is that most Americans are dumb, and actually think 1% of the population deserve 50% of the wealth.
With that mentality, it is impossible to create real progress in USA.
It’s more like 32% of the wealth for the 1%. And most of the 1% is not billionaires. Billionaires own around 5%.
Their real problem is millionaires. Or even just old people in general. People over 55 own 73% of the country’s assets and any time you see that BlackRock and Vanguard and so on own a large share of a large company, that’s their index funds, largely used by retirement funds. Of course even among old people it’s strongly skewed towards the top 10 or 20 percent owning most of the wealth.
Billionaires are just a corner case of the millionaire problem, and taxing millionaires out of existence would also take care of the billionaires.
The 50% confusion there is from the wealth of billionaires (1000ish people) being more then the wealth 50% of the population have cumulatively, not 50% of the total wealth of the nation.
Those funds exist because businesses dumped pensions and made people become investors. If you want to put a real dent in the investor class, you make pensions 100 percent mandatory for a corporation.
Respectfully, this take is ignorant.
I mean ignorant in formal sense, in that you’re speaking without a strong foundation of knowledge. But also in the informal sense in that frankly, what you’re saying is ugly and insulting to the working class of America, whose capacity to think you dismiss on the basis that you don’t know why they did something other than what you’d do.
To be clear: there ARE voters who match your description. However in many cases – as was the case in California’s billionaire tax – those are not the deciding votes.
The people who decide elections are – contrary to popular myth – complicated.
In the Bay Area, residents voted both to reject the wealth tax AND reject a measure that would make it harder to raise taxes in the future AND voted to raise their own taxes through a 0.5% sales tax to fund a public transit rescue package.
From even a cursory glance at the results across CA’s elections, it’s clear that voters didn’t have some flat left-versus-right metric, they demonstrated complicated, nuanced, choices.
Before concluding that this failed because working class voters are dimwitted savages too dumb to govern themselves, let’s wait until organizers and academics actually study the returns.
And in 2028, I’m going to go back out and work on passing the next version of this.
The reason that the billionaire tax failed is that it’s stupid. Taxing unrealized gain is wrong in most voters minds. There is a much much better solution.
All billionaires hold their wealth in stock, which until they sell it is an unrealized gain - meaning that money is not being actively used by the owner monetarily. Their superpower is leveraging against those stocks to get a loan to buy the $500 M yacht (looking at you Bezos). Currently that is tax free. I will argue to my grave that getting a loan against stock held is now a realized gain and should be taxed as such.
TL/DR; if you tell the voters billionaires should be taxed when they get a loan against their stocks to buy a mansion, yacht or election they would vote for this in a heartbeat.
Property tax is already doing that though.
Who cares? That has nothing to do with my solution.
I think this is one of many possible adjustments, but I agree with your point that a lot of people had questions about how thoroughly this had been planned, and didn’t quite trust the current version. That’s how I felt (although I voted for it anyway).
Anyway, I agree with you that there will be other versions of this, and some version will eventually pass.