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.
Can somebody devil’s advocate this for me? It would take months for a billionaire to recover from a 5% tax but the benefits would go on for decades.
My understanding:
That thing about many poor Americans considering themselves “temporarily embarassed billionaires”
Plus
If everyone gets healthcare then people who “dont deserve it” get it too, and it becomes harder to feel “better than” others
Plus
A terrifying amount of people believe advertisements based on saturation alone without critical thought
This is absolutely the stupidest fucking outcome for prop 40, genuinely. No, it was not and is not perfect. But literally any downwards wealth redistribution is an objective good, full stop. Anyone who voted for this who isnt, at poorest, a few tens of millions away from being a billionaire, is an abject idiot.
Apparently the airwaves were absolutely bombarded with misleading ads about this prop.
It’s startling how fast disinformation organically spreads. I saw disinformation being spread on Lemmy, presumably by actual people, within a day or so of the push to oust Hakeem Jeffries.
Why the fuck would teachers oppose a billionaire tax?
California is one of the most progressive states. If they vote this down, almost all hope is lost for Americans. I wish I would have been born in Europe sometimes.
There are some very red parts of California, and they have a lot of money.
The rich Hollywood elite should pay their fair share. Except for Tom Hanks. He is a national treasure! /s
Americans should pay a “Thanks” tax with all the proceeds going to Tom Hanks. Shit, everyone should pay that tax, not just Americans.
Personally I don’t believe we have enough culture wars and social division. We need more of that stuff bombarding us from every media outlet possible, just as the billionaires like it. That’s why they bought up mass media— so they can reach us 24/7 with their enlightened takes on humanity and community.
Who wants a return to the days we had decent infrastructure, convenient public transportation, and well-funded education? Not me! Who are we to stop billionaires from using their excess money to buy politicians and Supreme Court justices, and the endless lawyers needed to lobby nonstop for preferential treatment. If they want to destroy the occasional environment or pay to rape a child once in a while— well they’re so rich they earned the right! Way to go CA— never let billionaires lose their stranglehold on society!
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.
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 % 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.
After all, why would you want a small group of powerful people who hate you and work to destroy your quality of life to leave your state?
People really forget how good we had it when we had only like 4 billionaires. Thats when small businesses thrived and we had so many options for everything. Now only a handful of stores
Finally the people start caring for billionaires again 🙏
First they came for the billionaires, and I did not speak out, because I was not a billionaire.
(That’s sarcasm with a capital S just to be clear)
Then they came for the billionaires and I spoke out because wont anyone think of the poor billionaires?
We have to keep trying. We have to fight wealth inequality.
Many families are going with less because everyone is pulling together to help those who are really struggling.
How
The ads were nonstop and only showed the anti-wealth tax side. And there were 3 ballot initiatives that would poison any individual attempt to levy a new tax. They pulled out all the stops and there were at least 4 high profile billionaires behind it who don’t normally put themselves in the spotlight. Two Google founders and the money behind the investors behind andreessen horowitz.
And there were a few likely involved but not named like Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Cook. The anti taxers also had the close connections with business leaders to create unusual endorsements like the Planned Parenthood partner and some Democrats. Gavin Newsome, the governor of the state and big figure in the liberal opposition to Trump, was very vocal.
The good news: this is the same state that was swindled out of gay marriage by a very duplicitous campaign and a few years later reversed hard with a constitutional right-to-marry legislation. California will be talking about this and ready when it comes up again.
I would like to believe that but we also approved prop 42 which prevents taxes on personal assets. So we would need to repeal that before being able to attempt this again.
The voting guides that I saw people posting on nextdoor (since I live in a conservative part of Cali) described prop 40 as “a tax on ‘billionaires’ and a tax on ‘everyone’”. Literally I saw people saying that they would believe anything that a billionaire tells them over a politician.
This is prop 22 (iirc it was 22) all over again. Back when Uber and lyft convinced Californians to exempt them from calling their drivers employees.
I have an entire grocery bag of political mailers we I received this year, and almost half of that bag is “No on 40” flyers. My phone was getting 5 to 10 call per night with half those being No on 40, and I stopped even counting the text messages.
Gavin Fucking Newsom worked overtime with his billionaire buddies to make sure the billionaire tax was dead. I don’t understand how people bought into the propaganda, but there are a lot of things people fall for that I will never be able to understand.
The argument that people seem to be sticking mostly with is that any tax on a billionaire is a slippery slope to tax regular folk. Despite abundantly clear how narrow the measure is, people have been sweating up and down that the billionaire tax is “how they’ll get you”
Behind that is a “it’s not good enough so don’t even bother”, but that works be inconsistent with prop 42.
And of course, hundreds of millions of dollars of disinformation and drafting Prop 42 to intentionally mislead to that conclusion tends to do that.
In other words, they’re morons.
The wealthy pumped I think over $300 million into ads against prop 40 and drafted 41+42 to sow confusion about it. As much as I’d like to hold my fellow Californians to a higher standard, it became incredibly murky by design. It doesn’t help that people really worry that billionaires would leave the state (they won’t), and that they’ll uproot their companies and take those jobs away (they won’t).
There’s also a problem that too many Californians see themselves as temporarily embarrassed billionaires, so there’s that.
Maybe you’re right, we really can be the common clay of the new west.
nobody wants to be victims of a wealth tax
That wealth came at your expense buddy.
You have to be a victim of wealth first. Most people are safe.
most people know a millionaire and don’t know how massive the difference between a millionaire and a billionaire is
Well, just remind them that the difference between a billion and a million is about a billion. Or ask them if they’d mind giving you a buck (a friend would probably say yes), then ask how about a thousand bucks. That’s a difference the average person would grasp.
I would absolutely love to be the victim of a wealth tax.
I suspect the high turnout in this blue wave election was mostly from former Trump voters turning out to punish Trump and his party. They voted Dem up and down the ballot, but when their actual beliefs are on the ballot (taxation, trans rights) they still vote according to their right-wing beliefs.
Probably because a “one-time” thing isn’t sufficient.
It needs to be a continuous thing. Make them pay their share just as we pay our share.
Yeah it should have been called a 2027 tax, and informed people they can vote on it again as many times as they want.
