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.
It was this election’s reminder that people are dumb as shit.
Don’t get me wrong, it was a beautiful wave, but my personal belief is that it was due primarily to gas prices. That people are dumb as shit is not a belief at this point. And average ass bastards refusing to tax BILLIONAIRES is pretty solid proof of that.
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.
Yup, it was a case of people not doing their due diligence and actually digging into the bill. They saw the 30 second spot, paid for by billionaires, that said taxing billionaires was bad because [fill in the lie] and they just went with that.
It’s not surprising that Americans don’t do their due diligence when it comes to voting, but it is, and always will be, very disappointing.
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.
literally any downwards wealth redistribution is an objective good, full stop
Not if you spend all your political capital doing so. We need a nation-wide wealth tax. A one-time wealth tax in a single state is basically a payment for the wealthy to leave the state. They’re given more than enough time between the vote and enactment of the tax to establish residency in another state
It’s about chipping away at the monolith. It’s not about perfection. The effort will continue regardless. Prop 40 never included the provision of “let’s stop here and not go any further”.
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
I refuse to believe the “temporarily embarrassed billionaires” thing. Maybe that would have flown 20 years ago, but these days, very few people seem to hold any kind of belief that they will be wildly successful in the future. It feels more like a convenient excuse to focus on, rather than the more likely reason of billionaires ratfucking our legislative process and pumping ungoldy amounts of money into propaganda through the media which they all own.
Why the fuck would teachers oppose a billionaire tax?
Because it’s poor legislature. The long-term effect would be less taxes on billionaires
It’s too easy to dodge, and it being poor legislation would be used as an excuse not to tax billionaires in the future
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.
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.
Those funds exist because businesses dumped pensions and made people become investors. If you want to put a real dent in the investor class, you make pensions 100 percent mandatory for a corporation.
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% sales tax 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.
Taxing unrealized gain is wrong in most voters minds.
Property tax is already doing that though.
I think this is one of many possible adjustments, but I agree with your point that a lot of people had questions about how thoroughly this had been planned, and didn’t quite trust the current version. That’s how I felt (although I voted for it anyway).
Anyway, I agree with you that there will be other versions of this, and some version will eventually pass.
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?
Finally the people start caring for billionaires again 🙏
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
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!
We have to keep trying. We have to fight wealth inequality.
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?
Many families are going with less because everyone is pulling together to help those who are really struggling.
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.
When one tire is low in your car do you put air in it as a one time thing until you replace it, or do you not waste your time?
Irrelevant. And stupid.
You just bitch and wait until you can afford 4 new tires. Got it.
Yeah it should have been called a 2027 tax, and informed people they can vote on it again as many times as they want.
