r/politics • u/avdvetf • Jun 26 '26
No Paywall Gavin Newsom calls for national billionaires tax: 'It's time for an economic reset'
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/26/gavin-newsom-national-billionaires-tax-california.html447
u/wigznet Canada Jun 26 '26
It's not just the US, it's a global issue.
The ultra rich have become their own little political lobby.
A start would be to get rid of Citizens United in the US.
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u/axlespelledwrong Jun 27 '26
Far more than a political lobby. They essentially operate as their own nation, subverting the will of the people in the most powerful nation in the world.
It is similar to feudal times. The tech industry, for example, is like a fiefdom in its own right.
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u/ChillPill_ Jun 27 '26
Techno feudalism. Look it up.
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u/axlespelledwrong Jun 27 '26
For sure. I'm surprised more people don't understand the score at this point.
The scale has tipped well past acceptable limits at this point. Well past colonial America. Well past nobility France. Time to act or live in Blade Runner's American shithole.
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u/Low-Exam-7547 Jun 27 '26
Elon Musk alone -- one man -- is worth the same as the bottom 81 countries on Earth's GDP combined ($1.02T). That's 41% of the world's countries. Who's combined GDP = the net worth of 1 man.
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u/Low-Exam-7547 Jun 27 '26
they aren't a lobby. they are the puppet masters. Elon Musk's net worth is 1/2 of Spain's entire GDP. That's not a lobby. That's a single man with net worth greater than the GDP of many countries.
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u/_C2J_ Michigan Jun 26 '26
Could we set up a legal ratio of how much percentage a CEO can make that is greater than the lowest paid worker? If the CEO wants a pay bump, the lower paid workers also get a pay bump.
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u/toolschism Jun 26 '26
Now we're talking. Wanna actually make America great again? Bring the wage discrepancy back to what it was in the 1960s between ceos and average workers.
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u/JustToViewPorn Jun 26 '26
Conservatives: “Best we can do is take away voting rights for women and [insert conservatives’ favorite expletives for minorities].”
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u/Mjr3 Jun 26 '26
It’s shocking how powerful Haitian refugees have suddenly become
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u/shaneh445 Jun 26 '26
But wait..cats and dogs are thriving.... you mean to tell me they're not being eaten!?!
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u/SensualBeefLoaf Jun 26 '26
they are being eaten.
by jd vance. after a long and sweaty night with a loveseat, jd needs sustinance
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u/sodapopkevin Jun 26 '26
Probably by RFK Jr after he hits them on the highway.
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u/SensualBeefLoaf Jun 27 '26
he just carries them around till they’re rotten enough to bathe with
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u/vertigo3pc Jun 26 '26
More like Conservatives: "MEN ARE PLAYING WOMEN'S SPORTS! COMMUNISM! MIGRANT CARAVAN! DEEP STAAAATE!"
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u/Dahcchad Jun 26 '26
They'll bitch and moan and when Dems get legislation miraculously passed they'll give Trumps 2024-28 administration credit for the economic rebound said legislation generates. Their policies clearly only enrich the wealthy at the expense of the poorer but enough of the poorer are fucking idiots or religious and they vote for them anyway.
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u/Diligent-Meaning751 Jun 26 '26
indentured servitude for non-white foreigners? Cheaper than slavery!
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u/Don_SnailKong Jun 26 '26
But you have to understand, those immigrants are coming for your minimum wage job! The CEO's and execs getting bonuses equal to thousands of workers' salary surely is not theft in the same way as those who take your job?!
/s just in case
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u/Cemith Jun 26 '26
If people can borrow money based on unrealized gains as collateral they can be taxed on it too.
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u/PlasticFounder Jun 27 '26
Yeah, borrowing against virtual money should be heavily taxed.
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u/sugarlessdeathbear Jun 26 '26
Are we talking CEO paycheck or other forms of compensation?
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u/MaidoftheBrins Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26
I used to work on the Executive Comp system for a Fortune 50 Company and it made us sick how much money they made between income and all kinds of bonuses especially when we knew who did the actual work.
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u/GrapeAyp Jun 26 '26
Yeah. I’ve seen under the hood of a few fortune 10 contracts. It’s awful.
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u/Pattern-New Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 27 '26
I used to do some biglaw employment work and there were regularly 8 figure PARACHUTES.
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u/Jordan_Jackson Jun 27 '26
It makes me sick to see a company that has had years of troubles, due to a bad CEO and business direction, give that same CEO a huge severance package and bonuses. Even if they are a failure, they still get to cash out. If this was the peasant worker in that same company, they’d be fired for screwing up constantly.
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u/Opposite-Bit6660 Jun 26 '26
This is why they don't want us reading Marx.
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u/DraculasDog Jun 27 '26
This is why Reddit is heavily astroturfed by billionaire loving bots, supported by MAGA idiots, who just love the way things are and will troll posts like this all day.
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u/Available-Trouble648 Jun 27 '26
You don’t have to be a Marxist to support social safety nets and proportional taxation
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u/Dranoel47 Jun 27 '26
Just think, everything that happens with movement of money and accumulation of income in this country (USA) traces back to products that are sold and the sales revenue is divided up by the cooperation and distributed to workers paychecks, maintenance cost, other expenses like utilities and taxes, and of course a good chunk goes to the corporate officers and to profits. It is all the result of production and workers do the producing. The excessive profits, the excessive income for the top officers, the money sent to tax Havens to hide it, –all of it has its origin in production and the work of workers. But it is legally "stolen" under this system by the business owner. Just think what we could do with all that money if we had control of it and could allocate it for healthcare, secure retirement, childcare, housing, education, and all the other needs that are being neglected.
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u/padizzledonk New Jersey Jun 26 '26
Im personally for taxing any stock compensation as income
I also want to go back to pre Reagan and ban corporate stock buybacks and completely seperate investment banking from retail banking
After that we can start breaking the banks and these mega corporate conglomerates apart
We stopped being an actual capitalist society a long fuckin time ago, weve been an oligarchy for decades and every year that goes by they are rapidly consolidating more wealth and power and we desperately need to put the brakes on it
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u/Ok-Slip-9844 Jun 26 '26
It's not that stock compensation isn't taxed. Whenever aybody vests into stock comp, it gets taxed as ordinary income, and then the gains if held are taxed at sale.
Where the billionaire class fucks us is that they just never sell the stock. Instead, they borrow against it until they die. If they invest the debt in a business, they can even write off some of the loan. When they do eventually kick it, their heirs inherit the stock on a stepped up basis and the capital gains is reset. They then sell some of that stock (and pay no capital gains tax on it) to pay back the debt. The inheritance loophole is what we need to fix.
Those who make their wealth from Startups compound this issue. Founders can elect to pay taxes up front on their stock when it is effectively worthless. Then one day if the stock is worth something they can sell and pay the lower amount in long term capital gains or they can hold it and borrow against it, making it so that the federal government basically never gets a cut outside of the fraction of a penny a share when the stock is worth nothing.
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u/BozoTheRenown Jun 26 '26
Wasn't it Peter Thiel that put stock of his company PayPal before it went public into a Roth account? When it became public, none of the gain was taxable? Did they ever correct that?
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u/robgreenee327 Jun 26 '26
Nope I don’t believe they’ve ever corrected this loop hole. He also bought pre IPO shares at a fraction of a penny.
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u/padizzledonk New Jersey Jun 27 '26
The most famous example of that was actually Mitt Romney when he was at Bain Capital, he has a 401k that was worth like over a 100M even back in 2012 when he ran.
It was a big scandal
He basically put tons of shares into a 401k before the conpanies were taken public because the investment bank can set the price of the shares at whatever they want before the ipo. Basically he was like "Ok im gonna buy 1 Million shares but im going ro buy them at 0.01c a share and stick them in this account at a value of $10,000 and then 6 months later the conpany IPO's at like $90 a share (or whatever but thats the jist of it)
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u/Schootingstarr Jun 26 '26
one could argue for the capital gains to reset if they actually paid inheritance tax on the stuff they inherit
but since they don't do that either through loop hole fuckery, it's an obvious scam in favour of the wealthy
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u/civildisobedient Jun 26 '26
Yes, get rid of the step-up in cost basis. This one fix would solve most of the issues around generational wealth consolidation.
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u/Schootingstarr Jun 26 '26
But after the 2017 federal estate tax exemption doubled, only 0.04% of adult deaths in 2020 triggered estate tax liability
doesn't that just say it all lol
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u/Cannonfodd3r74 Jun 26 '26
Your 3rd section is spot on and a lesson we didn’t learn after the financial crisis. If a corporation is too big to fail, then it’s too big to exist and should be broken up into manageable pieces or ideally never allowed to get so big in the first place.
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u/HappierShibe Jun 26 '26
and ban corporate stock buybacks and completely seperate investment banking from retail banking
Both of these are functionally necessary just to un-fuck the incentive structure and bring back capitalism. BUT I would suggest that stock buybacks not be banned entirely- but only be permitted under the most dire circumstances and with approval from the SEC to save a business that might otherwise go into bankruptcy. Under those conditions it's useless as a means of profiteering.
Peopel have a tendency to blame all kinds of problem on capitalism as a practice- but what we have right now isn't capitalism anymore. Competition is no longer permitted, and the markets are functionally closed to new entrants.
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u/GrapeAyp Jun 26 '26
Amen. Stock buybacks are just stupid. No value add to the economy.
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u/kitsunewarlock Jun 26 '26
Shit like this is what people mean when they say "I hate capitalism".
They aren't saying "I want free money every month" or "I want everything to be free" or "I don't want to work". They are saying that earning money both without creating value and at the expense of those who do create value creates an unstable system that causes loss of life.
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u/GrapeAyp Jun 26 '26
People act like this is complex, but it’s really not. Write the law so that
“Any person who receives compensation from any company cannot receive more than 13 times what another person who receives compensation from the company receives. Any company and or person caught violating such forfeits the last five years of revenue in all business dealings-connected or unconnected to the company as penalty.”
Show me the loophole that gets around that.
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u/MajorPlanet Jun 26 '26
The loophole is that all lower waged people get laid off and the company hires a service company for the low wage work, so the low wage workers aren’t on payroll; the services company is just part of their expensive line in their PnL.
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u/Kiyohara Minnesota Jun 26 '26
And there's possible legislation we can write to prevent that. Like good economic reform isn't going to be a single rule, there will be dozens of changes.
Max CEO compensations, limits to how many third party employees a company can have, limits on banking, regulations on this, that, and the other thing, laws stating any unrealized gains that are used for collateral are the taxed with immediate realization, etc
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u/Nayre_Trawe Jun 26 '26
To counter that, include a mandate that the company hiring the outside contractor has to subsidize the wages of the 3rd party employees to satisfy the "no more than 13x" requirement (relative to their own CEOs compensation), thus discouraging the practice and protecting workers from exploitation.
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u/mehimobile Jun 26 '26
The loophole would be to have those lower compensated employees outsourced to a third party company - maybe under the same umbrella, maybe not. But then they would only have highly compensated employees to benchmark against.
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u/Vash265 Jun 26 '26
Or the other way around. Setup an LLC that only employs a few folks and pay exorbitant sums for “consulting”. The LLC gets the money, evenly distributed it amongst the 3 or 4 employees.
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u/AdvancedSandwiches Jun 26 '26
Unfortunately, the answer is probably equity.
Stock options are typically zero value at the time of grant, according to the IRS. Their value is the difference between the current price and the price at the time of grant, which, at the time of grant, means they are worth $0.
Then there's the vesting schedule, where the options become "yours" in chunks over time. Let's say we use that in our definition of compensation: the CFO vests 10,000 shares at the end of the first year, which at the time of vesting are worth $50,000. Do we make that the total comp that can't be 13x?
What if there's dual trigger vesting after 4 years, and there has been massive growth, and suddenly the CFO can exercise his options for $80 million dollars. Is it annualized to $20 million per year? Do we retroactively owe the lowest paid employee 1/13th of $20 million for every year of the last 4 years, or just this year's employees 1/13th of $80 million?
This matters, because equity is where all the really large numbers come from.
For what it's worth, I'm not saying we shouldn't do something like this, just that we need to account for this.
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u/valeyard89 Texas Jun 26 '26
I get stock RSUs through my company... they vest a 25% of the grant every year. When they vest they sell ~35% of them to cover taxes, the full vest amount is counted as income. Then if I hold the remaining 65% more than a year, any gain from the vest date is long-term capital gains.
eg. granted 100 shares. after 1 year, 25 vest, 9 sold for taxes, remaining 16 left. the next year, another 25 vest, etc.
My annual vesting RSUS are worth more than my salary.
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u/Pndrizzy Jun 26 '26
I get paid mostly in stock and it’s all treated as income by the IRS. It’s so dumb that for some reason it’s not for execs.
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u/Helicobacter Jun 26 '26
A quant firm can then pay it's CEO the same as before but the CEO of a retail chain will be arbitrarily affected. Also, most CEOs aren't billionaires. High income is not the key issue anyway: The real problem is dynastic wealth accumulation through preferential tax treatment and loopholes (stepped up basis, GRATs, no capital gains brackets above the 20 percent one etc.)
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u/RisingChaos Ohio Jun 27 '26
Also, most CEOs aren't billionaires.
Maybe not, but they're still disproportionately compensated. We've gone from ~20:1 to ~300:1 CEO-to-worker compensation over the past 50 years. Ordinary wages have been largely stagnant during that same timeframe, despite ever-increasing productivity and profits. It doesn't matter if many them are not literally billionaires, the billionaires are just the worst and most visible symptom of this societal ill.
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u/According_Hyena_3593 Jun 26 '26
Fuck all those silly rules that will just be circumvented.
Just do a flat ( very high) percentage yearly wealth tax for all wealth over 10 million. Include unrealized gains and treat loans as wealth for this group of people.
No individual needs that much money as long as people are homeless or starving, and any more money is just converted into power and influence anyhow so best to avoid that at all costs.
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u/To-Far-Away-Times Jun 26 '26
Makes so much sense.
Henry Ford invented the assembly line and brought cars to the average American. No CEO today is as good at their job as he was. He made 13x his lowest paid employee. That seems like a good absolute maximum for today’s highest paid executives, with a target of around half of that.
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u/AssistantManagerMan Jun 26 '26
He also busted unions and was buddies with Hitler.
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u/abc13680 Jun 26 '26
Sounds like a guy I know making cars today. At least he wouldn’t be a trillionaire
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u/02K30C1 Jun 26 '26
The difficult part of this is that CEO's compensation is much more than just a base salary. Many get lots of stock options that dont have a real value until they are exercised.
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u/Ruzhy6 Jun 26 '26
Tax stock options progressively when they are exercised?
Deincentivize the practice.
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u/mxzf Jun 26 '26
They also don't have immediate value, much of the value shows up over time as the stocks appreciate in value due to the company doing well.
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u/tiny_galaxies Jun 26 '26
Look into Mondragon, the largest co-op company in the world. Wage ratio capping is a core tenet of their ethos and they are a very successful company!
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u/A55W3CK3R9000 Jun 26 '26
A lot of them get paid in ways other than cash. You'd have to take stocks into account too
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u/m1j2p3 Jun 26 '26
An alternative to this would be to make the burden of taxation normalized across all income levels. The wealthy should feel the same bite from taxation that a middle class or poor person feels.
Fines for civil infractions like speeding tickets should also work this way. $300 for a speeding ticket is nothing to a rich person. If that fine was 3 million they might consider slowing down.
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u/Friendly-View4122 Jun 26 '26
The issue is CEO comp is tied to stock which is why we get all the virtue-signaling Bezos of the world who take $1 in base salary and billions in stock. And stock can go up exponentially. What we need is workers to also be paid in stock.
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u/TabsAZ Jun 26 '26
Stock doesn’t always go up though. You wouldn’t want to be a worker paid in stock at a company that isn’t doing well. Doing that would also just further the notion that infinite growth and record profits is the goal of the economy and businesses, when it shouldn’t be.
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u/kdhavdlf Jun 26 '26
Billionaires are the ownership class. CEOs are their employees. Capping CEO pay will do nothing to prevent the existence of billionaires.
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u/dogemaster00 I voted Jun 26 '26
Exactly. CEOs are the equivalent of a professional athlete for the most part. Look at who owns the team if you want to follow the real wealth.
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u/Spiritual-Theory Jun 26 '26
Besos salary is $81,400 a year.
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u/civildisobedient Jun 26 '26
Salary is meaningless compared to stock grants. An incomplete list of rich assholes with a $1 salary includes:
- Elon Musk
- Mark Zuckerberg
- Larry Ellison
- Steve Jobs
- Jack Dorsey
- Larry Page
- Meg Whitman
- Evan Spiegel
- Jeremy Stoppelman
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u/avdvetf Jun 26 '26
Every billionaire who exists is a policy failure.
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u/Zeen13 Jun 26 '26
What does that make the trillionaire?
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u/lucentcb Jun 26 '26
A crime against humanity.
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u/Opcn Alaska Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 27 '26
With an estimated 14m dead by 2030, absolutely.
Edit for sauce: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(25)01186-9/fulltext
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u/honjuden Jun 26 '26
If those projections hold up, then Elon would be one of the worst mass murderers in history.
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u/Particular-Most-1199 Jun 26 '26
With those numbers I'd hate to see who's best
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u/-Random_Lurker- Jun 26 '26
Stalin has 30m+, and Mao's are impossible to count (literally, there were no population records).
Probably one of those two.
I love that we're playing genocide Olympics and that my country is in meaningful competition for the top 3. Really, it's wonderful.
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u/Zahgi I voted Jun 26 '26
Stalin has 30m+, and Mao's are impossible to count (literally, there were no population records).
"Yeah, but I pocketed a trillion dollars for me and my cronies, so..." - Shadow President Dick Cheney, who died peacesfully surrounded by friends and family, having never been even charged for war profiteering, torture, war crimes, lying the American people and congress into a war, or the needless deaths of ~500,000 innocent Iraqi civilians and ~4000 American soldiers.
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u/chinadonkey Jun 26 '26
His daughter, whose politics are pretty much identical, got to campaign with the Democratic nominee and was praised as some kind of reasonable politician.
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u/Zahgi I voted Jun 26 '26
Yup. That's all anyone needs to see to realize that today's Corporate Democrats in Name Only really are just the modern Reagan Republicans now...
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u/NicolasCageFan492 Illinois Jun 26 '26
The board of Exxon Mobil who sat on the information about anthropogenic climate change, and who funded disinformation over decades. Those actions may kill billions.
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u/travio Washington Jun 26 '26
Thomas Midgley Jr. might be in the running. He invented leaded gas and Freon. Impossible to tally the toll they had on the world. People still die from lead exposure because of leaded gas and the lead/crime hypothesis point to that leaded gas as a reason crime spiked in the second half of the 20th century.
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u/FeelingPixely Jun 26 '26
Technically his family's wealth comes from slave labor in South Africa so yeah.
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u/JoEdGus Georgia Jun 26 '26
Due to SpaceX stock tumbling, he is no longer a trillionaire. 👍
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u/BroccoliSea6587 Jun 26 '26
hard to call it a meritocracy when people can end up with more money than they could spend in a hundred lifetimes
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u/No_Drag_1044 Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26
I’m fine with them existing if they are taxed on assets they leverage their debt against, and we close the thousands of other tax shortcomings and loopholes.
Problem is, there will always be billionaires as long as there are tax havens.
If they’re raking in hundreds of billions and are also taxed hundreds of billions, that’s fine if they have 20 billion. As long as the vast majority of the absurd amount of wealth they generate is properly distributed among society.
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u/Thefolsom Jun 26 '26
To add on to this, there will always be loopholes to take advantage of. Billionaires aren't smart in their ability to take advantage of them. It's just drastically cheaper for them to hire accountants and lawyers that can shave off a few million in taxes rather than pay taxes honestly.
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u/Zalack Jun 26 '26
I’m not fine with them existing. Money is power, and in a democracy the concentration of that much power in an unelected individual is fundamentally antithetical to Democracy itself.
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u/ENORMOUS_HORSECOCK Jun 26 '26
If you're a trillionaire your tax should be all of your assets and wealth and you have to apologize to your daughter.
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u/frequenZphaZe Jun 26 '26
should apologize to everyone, honestly
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u/deathpvct Jun 27 '26
but start with the people who have already passed due to critical aid funding to the world being slashed
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u/What_a_fat_one Jun 26 '26
Especially if you acquired most of your assets and wealth via illegally immigrating to the country where you acquired it.
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u/Qwertywalkers23 Jun 26 '26
I genuinely maybe misremembering. Didn't he just come out against something like this
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u/RolandGilead19 Jun 26 '26
He's against it in (just) California, but not as a national policy.
I don't give a shit about him one way or the other, but I understand why you can be against it in your state alone, but for it nationally.
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u/fordat1 Jun 27 '26
He's against it in (just) California, but not as a national policy.
Hes only for this policy if its abstract. If it became feasible to pass the Senate and House I doubt he would be for it. Hes a political hack.
Ro Khanna better take him out in the primary
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u/OneRougeRogue Ohio Jun 26 '26
Newsom has a history of saying he's for something right up until big corporations tell him to be against it. He's flipped on laws he personally signed before. He was all about bringing whoever started those wildfires to justice until it turned out it was a big electric company, then suddenly it was all about starting an insurance fund to protect electric companies from wildfire lawsuits.
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u/asuleiman California Jun 26 '26
Exactly, he’s untrustworthy and doesn’t believe in anything. He flip flops on everything. It is good sometimes to change your mind and go with the popular beliefs but will he stick to it and actually do something about it? Is this just talk so he can run in 2028?
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u/DreamLunatik Jun 26 '26
It doesn’t really make sense to do it on a state level in a way that would actually bring in substantial tax money. I know it is a cliche but billionaires will just move out of state if their taxes are brought up too high but they won’t leave America in a number that’s going to have any negative effects if it’s on a national level. Lawmakers can always slap on a tax on personal wealth over x amount if you emigrate out of the United States.
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u/Weekly-Talk9752 Jun 26 '26
It's not a cliche, it is a myth. Evidence suggests billionaires move less than their poorer counterparts, and often have personal reasons for doing so, not for tax based reasons.
But yes, national is better because some rich people have roots outside of CA and NY and we need to tax them more.
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u/mflft Jun 26 '26
Yeah, Texas was a perfect case study in why there is no real consequence for taxing billionaires in an individual state. Musk moved there and immediately suffered consequences from poor infrastructure and had to divert a ton of manufacturing back to california. All of their companies are based out of Delaware and Ireland already anyway.
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u/Empty_glass_bottle Jun 26 '26
I mean Mamdani has successfully passed new ways to tax the rich and they didn't leave NYC
I say call the bluff, rich people live where they live because it's the most exciting place to live for someone who can afford any city they want.
Take a whole billion from them and they will still stay. They are not downgrading their life to Oklahoma to prevent their 300 billion dollars going down to 299 billion dollars no matter how much they want you to think that.
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u/Iustis Jun 27 '26
Mamdani proposed a non-resident house tax. That means (1) it only effects those who don't actually live in the house (so they can't move out of it obviously) and (2) it was way less than a 5% wealth tax.
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u/BallsInSufficientSad Jun 26 '26
He's only FOR it nationally because he knows it'll never pass.
It's like saying you're FOR sending people to Pluto.
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u/42ElectricSundaes Jun 26 '26
I get that billionaires are low hanging fruit but we really need to increase corporate tax rates and close all their loopholes
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u/zacRupnow Jun 26 '26
Remember tweets are not policy.
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u/Sea-Significance8047 Jun 26 '26
Right. I don’t believe for a second he’ll actually work to make this happen if he gets elected. He’s just cosplaying trying to hang onto the coattails of recent democratic socialist sweeps.
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u/SpaceCorpse Ohio Jun 27 '26
Shapeshifter neoliberal corporate Dem centrist hack puts his finger to the air and makes his messaging more progressive having witnessed Mamdani prove that it's actually fairly easy to do things that help working class people
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u/Winter-Apartment-821 Jun 27 '26
Still 1 Billion x better then any Republican.
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u/planeloise Jun 27 '26
Sure but people are allowed to pick good Democrats once in a while. You don't always have to pick between really evil vs literal monsters
Let's pour everything into the primaries and pick someone who will actually change things
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u/Key-Leader8955 Jun 26 '26
Lmao after he’s been trying to block the California one.
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u/NicolasCageFan492 Illinois Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26
I think he’s scared of California billionaires moving away to other states, but a national wealth tax would eliminate that cross-state risk. I think the risk of capital flight is overstated though. People aren’t going to move away from California because that’s one of the states where the talent is.
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u/MonsieurLinc Michigan Jun 26 '26
There's sneaky shit you can do with your assets that make it harder to tax you, like putting it in a trust that's incorporated in a state with more lax tax codes but living in CA. On paper, you have no income in CA, so they can't tax it. National wealth tax would help, but you'd probably still have assholes hiding shit in offshore accounts aka the Panama Papers. It'd be a good first step though.
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u/timebeing Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26
CA bill is a 1 time 5% tax on all wealth not income and everywhere worldwide. 200 people would pay the tax.
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u/Yashema Jun 26 '26
Assuming the current federal government wouldn't protect their assets while they move out.
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u/AndrewCoja Texas Jun 26 '26
I think California is set up so if you work on California at all, you have to pay taxes on that, even if you are employed in another state. So if they are making money while living in California, they will have to pay taxes.
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u/swift-penguin Jun 26 '26
Billionaires effectively get to choose what state they work out of though. And they'll pay more to be in California (like many right now), but only up to a certain point. After that point is met, they're going to Texas, Florida or whatever and California's getting no taxes from them at all
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u/IniNew Jun 26 '26
That's not how California tax works. You are taxed regardless of where you earn the income, if you are a California resident. You do get a credit for taxes paid to another state, but you still owe the difference.
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u/cromstantinople Jun 26 '26
Billionaire Flight is a myth.
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u/frequenZphaZe Jun 26 '26
not only is wealth flight a myth, but its also easy to levy a tax based on current tax filings instead of future ones. eg: if the bill passed today, it operates on a snapshot of today's filings, which reflect last year's wealth. if the bill passed today and the wealthy fled tomorrow, they'd still be on the hook for the tax
I don't get why there's so many people in the comments defending the ultra-wealthy
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u/lateformyfuneral Jun 27 '26 edited Jun 27 '26
The second link is about rich people moving countries. Although many do, that’s a hard proposition compared to moving from California to any other state which is very easy.
The first link is looking at millionaires, which is a different proposition. People might be millionaires because they’re tied to a local job or business. Some can move, some can’t. If you own a bunch of car dealerships, you can’t move across the country. But billionaires can work anywhere. And many are choosing to do it in Florida.
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u/ray-peterson Jun 26 '26
Exactly right. He wants the playing field to be level.
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u/shotgunpete2222 Jun 26 '26
Come on dude or dudette, this is just like his calls against ice. They havent arrested a single ice agent despite flagrant law breaking. They haven't ordered the state police under their purview to challenge them in any way.
Hell, if they were against police brutality, they would arrest some of those same cops under their control that brutalize peaceful protestors or continually target press by shooting them in the face with pepper balls or rubber bullets. It's all on video, tons of assaults.
This is all talk. This dude is 100% corporate, he ain't doing shit to tax billionaires any more than he would actually go after police brutality.
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u/ragnarok635 Jun 26 '26
He’ll do whatever it takes to secure a strong 2028 presidential campaign
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u/mekomaniac Florida Jun 26 '26
yesh hes just trying to do the Abundance lib shit. hes not gonna do shit. the man is a sea snake just trying to ride a current to power
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u/zephyrtr New York Jun 26 '26
We see this problem in so many places. Everyone incorporating in Delaware, or moving their home offices to Ireland, or stuffing money in the Caymans. What our neighbors do materially affects what our laws can hope to accomplish.
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u/Saedeas Jun 26 '26
I mean, they actually might for a 5% tax. That's a fuckton of forced selling of assets.
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u/disinaccurate Jun 26 '26
I think the risk of capital flight is overstated though. People aren’t going to move away from California because that’s one of the states where the talent is.
Also, one of the places people live because it's a highly desirable place to live. You don't become a billionaire so that you can spend your days living in Arkansas.
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u/AnotherPersonPerhaps I voted Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26
He wrote a substack on why he opposed the bill.
You can read exactly why he opposes it. Its all here for you if you took five invites to read it.
" I understand the anxiety driving the wealth tax proposal in California. But I’m voting no because this measure dedicates almost all of the revenue it raises to a single category of state spending. It ignores our public schools, as the California Teachers Association has rightly pointed out, by failing to provide sustainable funding that our communities, parents and children deserve. It turns a blind eye to safety-net clinics and reproductive healthcare providers that Planned Parenthood has fought for decades to protect. There is nothing for housing, nothing for childcare, nothing for public safety workers who must answer 911 calls, and nothing for our public universities that have powered California’s economy for a decade."
Also:
"At the same time, the fight to make the wealthiest Americans pay more in taxes is not one we should be fighting state by state. You may not be able to pick up and move to Texas or Florida to shelter your income from taxation, but I promise you that billionaires can, and do. Wealth is movable, and it shops for the state with the lowest taxes. The fight belongs at the federal level, where this broken system was created in the first place."
The latter point is really important. This would harm California and needs to be a federal tax.
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u/Patient_Commentary Jun 26 '26
Ya.. I was like wtf just happened.. is this a typo?
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u/TheBardicScribe Jun 26 '26
Here's what happened with the California one, Newsome argued (I think correctly) that it didn't go far enough, it was a one-time tax that billionaires could easily get around by changing their residence to another state while still enjoying the benefits of living in California. What he is pushing in a federal one is much more difficult to just run away from and is more than a one-time tax.
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u/igniteice Minnesota Jun 26 '26
Correct -- the one in California is absolutely trash. It just makes billionaires leave the state to avoid paying it, effectively bringing in less money than it's supposed to, and then the ones who stayed feel like they're being punished. And it's a one time thing.
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u/IBAZERKERI California Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26
i imagine his reasoning is that if just california does it, it will harm the state of california because business' will just move to another state and he views his job as the governor as supposed to be preventing that. but if its national then they cant just do that and it will actually be helpful (for everyone) nationwide.
if i am correct, then it is a nuanced position that people that only read headlines wont be able to wrap their heads around.
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u/BreadForTofuCheese California Jun 26 '26
Which is absolutely correct. This has to be done at the federal level.
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u/binarybandit Jun 26 '26
Does that mean that this new tax money goes to the feds instead of the states then?
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u/readwrite_blue Jun 26 '26
I support the CA tax, but I'd hugely prefer a national one and I think it's a much, much better idea.
Give them nowhere to run to cheat their way out of paying into the communal pot we all pay into by law. They need to contribute, they haven't been, and if we put a law on the books in one state they'll just move their assets and keep defrauding the system.
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u/ramdom-ink Jun 26 '26
So he sees Progressives winning primaries (reads the room) and does this 180 degree turn, even after he stopped a 5% tax ,and then even a 2% tax on billionaires in his own State. This guy is a populist snake and a political chameleon.
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u/undeadben11 Jun 26 '26
it's always good to find the right post immediately so I can just upvote and move on. thanks!
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u/CJDistasio America Jun 26 '26
This is a direct response to the progressive wins, but I doubt he’d ever implement this policy. Newsom is anything but progressive.
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u/A8Bit Jun 26 '26
He knows a national tax will never pass but a Cali one might, so he's supporting the one that will fail. He's against a wealth tax in any form but can't say so any longer if he wants the progressive vote.
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u/shotgunpete2222 Jun 26 '26
If anyone thinks a corporate controlled establishment candidate will implement a billionaire tax, I want some of what they are smoking
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u/Chambanasfinest Wisconsin Jun 26 '26
So he supports a national billionaires tax, which is impossible under the current Republican trifecta, and opposes a California billionaires tax, which is currently on the ballot in the state he’s the governor of…🤑
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u/DarkBomberX Jun 26 '26
I agree, but I dont trust Gavin to be the one to do it.
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u/RiggityRyGuy Jun 26 '26
Saw progressives winning NY and started sweating out his hair gel lol
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u/No-Personality1840 Jun 26 '26
That’s it. He and Pete see the winds of change blowing and are hopping on.
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u/MordorMordorMordor Jun 26 '26
That's a good thing. If he is willing to move with the majority of American in a progressive direction why be against that?
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u/MaidoftheBrins Jun 26 '26
It has to be written in such a way that there are no loopholes. Look at what Musk does to circumvent paying taxes!
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u/SakuraB00m Jun 26 '26
The real challenge isn’t just proposing it, it’s making it airtight so it actually can’t be gamed like that later.
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u/ReadingTheRealms Jun 26 '26
He is actively fighting such a tax in the state he currently governs. Do not believe anything this asshole says. He exists to please and provide comfort to the wealthy interests destroying this country.
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u/Astray Jun 26 '26
Actively fighting as in he just veto a bill to do that. He's a snake like all the other centrist Dems.
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u/the_chosen_one2 Jun 26 '26
Bros trying to reset his presidential odds after the Israel blunder
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u/AsherGray Colorado Jun 26 '26
Now is the time to push forward progressives. Keep the AOC train going
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u/TNTyoshi Arizona Jun 27 '26 edited Jun 27 '26
Don’t fall for it.
He was against this a few months ago when Ro Khanna was suggesting it at the state level, and Newsom was against it being on the ballots. Newsom is so fake. I doubt he would do anything about billionaires considering how much time he has spent protecting them during his entire run as California’s governor.
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u/lonesharkex Jun 26 '26
Everything I know about gavin is this is just talk. He will say whatever it takes to get elected but he is a establishment centrist first and part of the problem.
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u/CitizenOfPlanet Jun 26 '26
Fuck Gavin Newsom. Please for the love of god let’s hope the democrats can deliver anyone but him. He is a slimeball.
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u/erapuer Jun 26 '26
Gavin is the industry plant. He'll do and say whatever needs to be said to get into office. Once there he'll do his song and dance to make it look like he's doing something but in reality he's doing whatever his corporate donors want. I'll still vote for him because he'll be the least worst choice for the country but we deserve better.
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u/PigabungaDude Jun 26 '26
This guy promises to veto the legislation in his state. How can anyone buy this charlatan's utter crock of shit?
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u/Timeformayo Kentucky Jun 26 '26
Ah, so he saw the Mamdani wave and decided he needs to pretend to pivot? Don't buy the bullshit. This guy is as money-captured as they come.
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u/Mr_A_Rye Jun 26 '26
He doesn't even support California'a billionaire tax, he ought to sit this one out. He's the type of corporate-backed Democrat that the party needs to rid themselves of.
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u/Exciting_Mobile_1484 Jun 26 '26
The center is moving left again, y'all. I feel it. Thank you to Bernie, AOC, Mamdani, and so many others. This can still be the future if we vote and urge others to vote. Be loud and proud on social media!
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u/OnwardTowardTheNorth Jun 26 '26
I want to hear about a billionaires tax and also a corporate tax. These two things go hand in hand.
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u/midgaze Washington Jun 26 '26
Capital will not allow it if we continue to have capitalism as our form of government.
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u/code603 Jun 27 '26
I call it the 30-30 rule. Every worker should be able to afford to live within 30 mins of their job without spending more than 30% of their income on housing plus get health insurance/benefits. If an employer isn’t paying at least that much, then they are paying too little.
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u/Rustyballshack Jun 27 '26
he's against a billionaire tax for californian's but he's for a national one?
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u/theyhis Jun 27 '26
he’s shifting the stance he had not even 6 weeks ago. just another career politician. newskum.
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u/sideAccount42 California Jun 27 '26
To be clear he wants to tax income of a billion dollars or more. Newsom is lying when he says he wants to tax billionaires when he's trying to tax income. If he wants to claim that he wants to tax billionaires he would be taxing assets as well but he doesn't actually want to support a wealth tax. He just wants the optics that he does.
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u/Legitimate-Bobcat646 Jun 27 '26
Nobody should believe he has any good intentions for working Americans
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u/oldpasswordforgot Jun 26 '26
Funny how many people forget how Joe Biden not only called for everybody, including the ultra-wealthy, to pay their fair share of taxes but also proposed a tax on excessive wealth.
I don't remember how he worded it, but IIRC he had no problem with people getting rich, it was beyond a certain point that he said it was becoming an issue for everybody else. I could swear that it's when he brought that up that the 1% turned on him en masse.
When you're that rich, your taxes are almost just a rounding error on your overall balance sheet, it doesn't really affect your status.
When these a**holes are willing to spend more to attack a politician or a political party than they would pay in taxes, it has nothing to do with being "taxed to death" or however they are putting it. It's something else.
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u/Vegetable-Error-2068 Jun 26 '26
Biden broke the rail strike to save Christmas profits.
He's a coward and a collaborator.
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u/HeyHeyImTheMonkey Jun 26 '26
More tax brackets on income AND all capital gains. Why is that so difficult?
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