🏛️ California wealth tax fails to pass — but the proposal alone drives the exodus

“It will kill the California economy. ... So I don't think it's going to pass this year or next year. ... But the fact that they're even putting it on the table is making a lot of people second guess whether California is the place they want to create their businesses.”

“And I just don't think this is going to pass because it's not justifiable.”

“this is really going to hurt the California tax base, because if you start raising taxes on, you know, California millionaires, more of them are going to leave the state, and then that tax revenue leaves the state. And so it actually hurts the general budget. ... I think we're due for a huge budget shortfall next year because there's going to be no capital gains.”

“This is a state in which you have a disappearing middle class. The middle class has been moving out of the state by the hundreds of thousands. In fact, last year, we had for the first time net migration out of the state.”

“No, the great thing is we have a running A-B test, which will show whether this state central planning can work or not. And again, if we refuse to want to listen to the examples of Russia or all of these other countries that have tried this, then so be it. We will know in the next three to five years that these policies actually don't work and actually that it actually accelerates the exact hellscape that they think they're trying to avoid.”

“There's certainly a calculus going on with Newsom, I believe, in the impact that having higher tax rates would have on what is clearly not just a theoretical, but an actual evidenced exodus from the state of wealthy and high income earners.”

“There is a hostility toward business that has emerged in California that I think is commensurate and related to the tax rate, but also separate.”

“So I think that, in my opinion, actually, like there's actually this beautiful symmetry where even if taxes are high, your earnings potential is commensurately higher, such that the net that you're left with is the same as if you were in another place where taxes may be zero, but you're just not going to get exposed to the same ways to make money.”