What starts in Califoria doesn’t stay in California. A proposed “billionaire tax” has made its way onto the ballot in this year’s election. In “Exit the billionaire,” I looked to Hoover Senior Fellow Joshua Rauh to explain why it would make the state poorer in the long run.
Well, as a famous economist once said, in the long run we are all dead. Proponents of the tax will live it up while the sun shines.
Hoover has now posted Rauh’s short course on the proposed billionaire tax here with citations to his written work on the subject. I have embedded the accompanying video below. What we have here, among other things, is another case study in the proposition that it’s a long way to temporary.
In my earlier post, I quoted Rauh: “This tax is billed as one time, but why would anybody believe that it’s a one-time tax? I mean the measure has to write its wealth tax authorization into the California Constitution. It’s written in a way that’s specific to this measure, but once that infrastructure is in place, future wealth taxes can be built on top of it, on top of this infrastructure, at any rate, at any threshold, and at any time. The important point is that billionaires understand this. That’s why they’re leaving…”
