From Golden State to Failing State: California's Stupidest Idea Yet

Workers from one of California's largest public-sector unions hit the streets in the new year to collect enough signatures to put a "billionaire's tax" initiative on the ballot in November — just so illegal aliens can keep getting free healthcare.

“Even before we launched this initiative, we knew that having the wealthiest in our society step up to pay their fair share, to help the rest of the folks in California, we had a feeling it was going to be popular,” Renée Saldaña, a spokesperson for Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West, told The Center Square on Monday. "These frontline health care workers have been chomping at the bit to get out there and start gathering signatures."

The proposed tax is a one-time 5% state wealth tax on all California's billionaires, imposed on "all types of personal property and wealth, including capital stock, bonds, artwork, collectibles and investments," according to that Center Square writeup.

How might that work in practice? Would California's billionaires have to take their art collections with them to dodge the taxman, leaving major museums with empty walls? The tax is supposed to be collected in 2027, but there's no telling how long it might take to work out the legal complications.

On the other hand, it's easy to picture various appraisers rubbing their hands together in gleeful preparation.

How big a hit might tech shares take, as billionaires sell off their most liquid assets to fill Sacramento's gaping maw? Nobody knows.

The initiative would direct 90% of revenues collected to restoring cuts to the state's Medi-Cal program, which Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Democrat-dominated state legislature created because illegals were bankrupting the program.

You've got to laugh at the "One-time" part. Once the dam bursts on any new revenue stream, government — and its hangers-on, like public employee unions — fight like hell against repairs.

Anyway, NewsNation Now reported Tuesday that "analysts warn that if the measure becomes law, California could lose hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue each year, along with jobs, investment and innovation tied to its tech-driven economy."

You might expect Gov. Newsom to come out swinging against any measure that would hit his Bay Area buddies so hard, but Politico calls the initiative his "big dilemma" over whether to "tax the rich or defy the left." But this is Politico, so it's an open question whether they're doing honest reporting or trying to corner Newsom into supporting the initiative.

And Another Thing: My headline is facetious, of course — there's really no way to tell which of California's many self-inflicted wounds is actually the stupidest. I left the state in 1994, right after Sacramento issued a decree requiring individuals to file CalEPA impact statements in triplicate before going to the bathroom.

The real reason I left was that the groupthink already well entrenched in San Francisco by the early '90s was an early warning sign of impending doom. California, in general — and the Bay Area, in particular — is blessed with such natural beauty and almost unparalleled human capital that it could endure more self-inflicted wounds than almost anywhere.

When things first looked grim in the '90s, the dotcom boom flooded the state with money. The social media boom did it again after the Great Recession. And now, there's AI.

So Hollywood might be slowly withering away, the state's aerospace and automobile manufacturing bases might be shadows of their former selves, and Sacramento might dry up the state's bounteous farmland (except for viniculture, of course), but the Bay Area tech machine continues making enough money to serve as a 24/7/365 blood transfusion into a seriously ill patient.

But if Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West succeeds with its "billionaire tax" and drives out the billionaires? It might finally be, "Game over, man!"

And Another Thing: Left unsaid by both SEIU-UHWW and Center Square's Madeline Shannon is that the roughly 3.4 million "Californians" losing their Medi-Cal coverage are illegal aliens, and that cancellation was a Democrat-led effort forced by budget realities. It looks to me like the Complicit Media might already be all-in on the SEIU's wealth tax. We'll see.

I've written on more than one occasion that California's tech cash cows — Apple, Google, Meta, etc. — aren't going anywhere. Their people, their shiny headquarters, their culture, are all immutably Bay Area. But I've also written on more than one occasion that as overregulation and overtaxation continue growing, that disruptor firms — the startups that will someday displace Apple, Google, Meta, etc. — won't necessarily come from the Bay Area.

If the billionaires leave and take the startups with them, what becomes of California?

That's the question that must haunt Sacramento, mostly because it doesn't dare answer it honestly.