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6 comments
This seems like a low effort opinion piece that is unlikely to generate useful discussion here.
You're right. I hadn't come across other coverage of this, but I should have thought twice before submitting this one. Sorry!
I now see at least one article with more depth: https://sfstandard.com/2026/03/09/california-billionaire-tax...
I now see at least one article with more depth: https://sfstandard.com/2026/03/09/california-billionaire-tax...
I don't understand billionaires. I thought one of their favorite things was to pull up by ladder behind them. Which is why they love regulatory capture so much.
At their levels of wealth money means nothing but a high score. That's all it is. There's nothing they can't buy. They could lose 99.9% of their wealth and that'd still be true. So wouldn't wealth taxes be that same regulatory capture? Put like steep ones but cap at $100bn. Then no one else can get to where they are. No one can climb the ladder they did. (Who am I kidding, no one will buy that)
At their levels of wealth money means nothing but a high score. That's all it is. There's nothing they can't buy. They could lose 99.9% of their wealth and that'd still be true. So wouldn't wealth taxes be that same regulatory capture? Put like steep ones but cap at $100bn. Then no one else can get to where they are. No one can climb the ladder they did. (Who am I kidding, no one will buy that)
Let's all spare a tear for the billionaires like Sergey, who may suffer grievous financial harm from a wealth tax. He might even have to own fewer private jets! The horror.
in my experience (at least for the billionaire I worked for), most billionaires think like most capitalists do.
Money is just a tool, a tool to get stuff done. sure it lest them live an easy lifestyle (by mere mortal reckoning). But its primary use is as leverage to make the world work like lego bricks does to everyone else...
They also have a deep disdain of Governments ability to do competent things with all that lego.
They dont want to give lego to a ever shifting group of people that do mostly useless things with the lego. THEY are driven to make the lego do things they view as useful. they dont want to see that lego wasted.
I'm not forgiving their abuse of the lego, I'm making an observation.
Money is just a tool, a tool to get stuff done. sure it lest them live an easy lifestyle (by mere mortal reckoning). But its primary use is as leverage to make the world work like lego bricks does to everyone else...
They also have a deep disdain of Governments ability to do competent things with all that lego.
They dont want to give lego to a ever shifting group of people that do mostly useless things with the lego. THEY are driven to make the lego do things they view as useful. they dont want to see that lego wasted.
I'm not forgiving their abuse of the lego, I'm making an observation.
Budgets should be balanced, with smart long term planning and sensible spending. We should not resort to a special “billionaire tax” to fund our mismanaged budgets.
When our high speed rail runs out of funds (and triples in costs with little to show for it), do we slap another billionaire tax? When homeless spending goes missing and doesn’t make a dent, do we add another tax? When cal fair plan goes insolvent?
And then when they’re all gone, we go after the hundred millionaires.
This isn’t the solution. The solution is to fix tax loopholes, that generate sustainable income; with spending that is long term balanced and based on realistic interest rates.
Politicians generally don’t try to solve these hard long term problems, but put up short term patches that are incredibly harmful for the state.