Will California Voters Reject the Billionaire Tax? | Victor Davis Hanson

Majority of California voters oppose billionaire tax. New poll shows California voters are souring on a proposed billionaire tax with more than half opposing the measure, while a contentious voter ID proposal has sparked a razor-thin divide in the deep blue state of California. Post poll reveals Proposition 40, a proposed one-time 5% wealth tax on billionaires, The measure faces opposition from... 52.6% of the voters compared with 34.5% in support, 11.5% undecided, according to a new poll by McLaughlin and Associates. Victor, are you surprised that there's a negative? Uh... No, because there's a certain way to interpret these. Please. kind of counterfactual polls. So we had Prop 209, and then we had, I guess it was Prop 13, efforts in the past, for example, to ban DEI, racial discrimination, and they passed overwhelmingly. Part of it was we have a large, the Asian community is now about 15% of the population, and they were, you know, they're very meritocratic, and that helped on those particular issues. When you have a... multi-racial, multicultural state in which 27% of the people were not born here. And when you add the second generation whose parents were not born, you get up to 45%, kind of like Canada. And then in addition to that, you have people, 21% on the poverty level, under the poverty level, highest, I think, in the country of any state. And then on top of that, 50% of all the births or Medi-Cal. And 40% of the state is on Medi-Cal. So then you're told, your first impulse, you hate billionaires. They're crooks. They steal everything. And then the billionaires run really great ads that say, well, wait a minute. We're a big, fat goose that lays golden eggs. And the golden eggs are your 50% of, basically, it's the subtext. You're 50. One out of every two births, basically, is welfare. And 1% pay 50% of the income tax. So if you kick us out, you're going to lose billions of dollars. And we're going to take the jobs with us. And then you're going to do what next? You're going to go after the people who are worth $100 million. And then when they leave, you're going to go after $10 million. And then, no. So I don't think the voters sophisticated to get the entire argument, but basically they put their hand up and, who's going to pay for all my stuff? And before with the racial, ethnic divisions, they were saying, my tribe should get stuff, but that tribe is getting stuff. So let's have no tribes get any stuff because it was too hard to, there were too many, as I said before, when 209 and 13 came up again, If it was 13, I might have, I forgot the second vote. And that's, it's in the legislature. Again, they're trying to override both of the ballot propositions. But my point is a lot of people said, I want my, my tribe, my village, my people, I want them to get stuff. And then they realize that there's too many different stuff for too many different people. So they just said, let's, it's just, it's just. Quit it. Don't do that. And there's self-interest. The same thing with this tax. They said, who's going to pay for all this stuff? Who's going to pay for my Section 8 housing? Who's going to pay for my food stamps? Who's going to pay for my WIC card? Who's going to pay my EBT card? Who's going to pay for my legal assistance? Who's going to pay for my... Default on my PG&E where I'm part of the 25% of PG&E users that doesn't pay his power bill. Oh, taxes. But there's only, and then the commercials say, well, you know, there's only 1% of the population that pays it, pays half. And you're driving them out of state at the rate of 250, and they see the state is getting poor. It really is. Yeah, they're just the, the, um, Proposing of the tax, I think, has already done great economic harm to California. Yeah, they've lost. And, you know, I don't like to be a social Darwinist because there is a lot of very ignorant people who make a lot of money and a lot of people inherit it and a lot of people get money through divorce. Steve Jobs' widow, Jeff Bezos' widow didn't make that money. Maybe they could argue they helped their husbands at one time make it. But to make that type of money, you've got to be pretty smart. And when you get rid of those smart people, you get rid of Elon Musk. If you were stupid enough to do him harm or to regulate him into oblivion, he launched more of these satellites last year than the entire world combined. And all these kids that hate him that scroll all day like mindless zombies on their phone, You're doing that because of his satellite system, for the most part. And you can say you hate Tesla, but when you get in the Tesla, it's pretty amazing. I mean, I can be on the coast and I can charge my Tesla, you know, 200 miles a home. I can tell where it is anywhere in the world. It's an amazing product.