The destroyer of California, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Of Course), wants very, very much to be president of the United States, and it is becoming increasingly clear to him that having good hair and a glib mien aren’t going to be enough. Newsom has already led to an unprecedented flight of taxpaying citizens from his state, but instead of doing the responsible thing and admitting that his far-left policies have failed and destroyed the Golden State, he is doubling down, and advocating even more far-left lunacy.
After all, the Democrat Party just took a decisive step toward socialism. Newsom apparently thinks that if he wants to be its 2028 standard-bearer, he needs to out-socialist the party’s most prominent socialists, and their independent godfather, Bernie Sanders, to boot. And so he has just come out for a communist scheme that, if it were ever implemented, would bankrupt not just California, but the nation as a whole.
CNN reported Friday that Newsom “proposed a national tax on billionaires that he says is the first part of an ‘economic reset for America’ agenda, which aides explicitly say is part of his considering to launch a presidential campaign.”
Why a national tax, and not just a California state tax? Well, when your confiscatory tax rates induce productive people to flee from California, where are most of them going to go? Most of them will still be somewhere in the United States, and so a national tax will give them nowhere to run to unless they want to flee abroad, and they’ll be forced to pay for the Democrats’ socialist madness whether they want to or not.
A tax on billionaires might sound appealing and even just to those who don’t know anything about how economics works, but leaving the socialists aside, it would destroy the economy entirely. The dirty little secret that socialists and Democrats (if there is any difference anymore) never tell you is that the poor need the rich. The rich, the billionaires, own the businesses that employ the rest of the population. Levy prohibitive taxes upon them and take away their incentive to work hard and earn money, and the billionaires won’t be the only ones who suffer. All the other people who depend upon them will suffer as well.
Newsom, however, is selling his scheme as a matter of simple justice: “The system America’s founders built was designed to prevent the concentration of power in a few hands, but we have allowed that concentration to happen anyway, slowly, in plain sight, over decades. We can reverse it together, as a country.”
No, we can’t. Unfortunately for Newsom and his fellow leftists, inequalities among people are built into human nature. Some are intelligent; some are not. Some are industrious; some are not. Some are athletic; some are not. Some are handsome and witty; some are ugly and plodding. It’s just a fact of life. The state is perfectly within its rights to try to ensure equality of opportunity, but there is no way it can ensure equality of outcome, and all it can do if it tries is penalize the productive and reward the indolent.
Heedless of all that, California voters are going to vote on a billionaires’ tax in November, and in light of the fact that most average Americans have no idea what socialism really involves or why it doesn’t work, they might well approve this tax. Newsom is “calling for a minimum tax on anyone worth more than $100 million so that they pay at least the same rate, rather than less, than the average American worker who doesn’t have loopholes and other maneuvers to benefit from.”
Well, rich people should indeed not pay less tax than poor people, but the idea that they do so is a leftist myth. The National Taxpayers Union Foundation reports that “the top 10% of earners accounted for 70.5% of all income taxes paid in 2023, while the top 25% were responsible for 86.3%. Collectively, taxpayers in the top half of income brackets earned 87.7% of all income and paid 96.7% of the federal income tax burden. While these shares declined modestly from 2022, they remain near historic highs.”
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Newsom’s plan would increase the percentage of all income taxes that the top 10% of earners pay. How is that fair? It isn’t of course; what leftists call “equity” is actually government-sanctioned theft and the hamstringing of the productive. Which only makes society less productive.
Socialist nations in the past, knowing that every sane person wanted to flee the country, built walls to keep people in. Newsom can’t build a wall around California, but he fears that the new tax will cause businesses to leave the state, and of course he is right. That’s why he has come out for a national tax on billionaires.
“We’re competing with 50 states,” Newsom whined “Capital flows and move(s). That’s real. It’s not imagined. It’s very, very real.”
Yes, it is. And no one must be allowed the escape the ravening socialist maw.
