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.
How
The ads were nonstop and only showed the anti-wealth tax side. And there were 3 ballot initiatives that would poison any individual attempt to levy a new tax. They pulled out all the stops and there were at least 4 high profile billionaires behind it who don’t normally put themselves in the spotlight. Two Google founders and the money behind the investors behind andreessen horowitz.
And there were a few likely involved but not named like Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Cook. The anti taxers also had the close connections with business leaders to create unusual endorsements like the Planned Parenthood partner and some Democrats. Gavin Newsome, the governor of the state and big figure in the liberal opposition to Trump, was very vocal.
The good news: this is the same state that was swindled out of gay marriage by a very duplicitous campaign and a few years later reversed hard with a constitutional right-to-marry legislation. California will be talking about this and ready when it comes up again.
The argument that people seem to be sticking mostly with is that any tax on a billionaire is a slippery slope to tax regular folk. Despite abundantly clear how narrow the measure is, people have been sweating up and down that the billionaire tax is “how they’ll get you”
Behind that is a “it’s not good enough so don’t even bother”, but that works be inconsistent with prop 42.
And of course, hundreds of millions of dollars of disinformation and drafting Prop 42 to intentionally mislead to that conclusion tends to do that.
In other words, they’re morons.
The wealthy pumped I think over $300 million into ads against prop 40 and drafted 41+42 to sow confusion about it. As much as I’d like to hold my fellow Californians to a higher standard, it became incredibly murky by design. It doesn’t help that people really worry that billionaires would leave the state (they won’t), and that they’ll uproot their companies and take those jobs away (they won’t).
There’s also a problem that too many Californians see themselves as temporarily embarrassed billionaires, so there’s that.
Maybe you’re right, we really can be the common clay of the new west.
nobody wants to be victims of a wealth tax
You have to be a victim of wealth first. Most people are safe.