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[–] 53 points 3 days ago (8 children)

Meanwhile in California, over 50% of the population voted against taxing billionaires via Prop 40. I don't understand that one at all. The fear mongering worked, I guess.

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  • [–] 29 points 3 days ago (3 children)

    Yeah well the standard line they always trot out whenever anybody starts talking about taxing billionaires is the threat of the billionaires leaving. The thing is, if they were actually prepared to do that they wouldn't spend all the money fighting it, they would just wait until it happened, and then leave.

    Billionaires don't really care about tax, it's like the least expensive thing they spend money on in a year. They'll quite happily spend 10,000 times as much on a yacht, it's like asking an average earner if they would consider moving to get out of paying a 40 cent annual surcharge.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 days ago

    The very shallow take that taxing the rich will make them move somewhere else or hurt jobs. They are already hoarding the money and jobs are based on other factors. If the rich moved around based on taxes, they wouldn’t live in any western countries at all. Terkministan would be the prime destination. They live in places like California and New York because they like it there, otherwise North Dakota would be the new hotspot in the US.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

    The billionaires bought two fake propositions to cancel out 40, then they pushed endless ads about saying that your retirement, schools, hospitals, etc. woudl be destroyed by yes on 40, no on 41, no on 42.

    AKA Capital and its state doing what the enslavers concocted it to do - violently defend their disgusting privilege at the expense of everybody else.

    The violence in this case is the attack on healthcare, etc.

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  • [–] -1 points 2 days ago

    Prop 40 is not a good way to tax billionaires. A wealth tax is extremely messy. To institute an entirely new approach to taxation would create years of accounting and legal headaches, and only help short term.

    And it's hard to overstate how shortsighted a single-time tax is.

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