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.
I would like to believe that but we also approved prop 42 which prevents taxes on personal assets. So we would need to repeal that before being able to attempt this again.
The voting guides that I saw people posting on nextdoor (since I live in a conservative part of Cali) described prop 40 as “a tax on ‘billionaires’ and a tax on ‘everyone’”. Literally I saw people saying that they would believe anything that a billionaire tells them over a politician.
This is prop 22 (iirc it was 22) all over again. Back when Uber and lyft convinced Californians to exempt them from calling their drivers employees.
I have an entire grocery bag of political mailers we I received this year, and almost half of that bag is “No on 40” flyers. My phone was getting 5 to 10 call per night with half those being No on 40, and I stopped even counting the text messages.
Gavin Fucking Newsom worked overtime with his billionaire buddies to make sure the billionaire tax was dead. I don’t understand how people bought into the propaganda, but there are a lot of things people fall for that I will never be able to understand.
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
That wealth came at your expense buddy.
You have to be a victim of wealth first. Most people are safe.
most people know a millionaire and don’t know how massive the difference between a millionaire and a billionaire is
Well, just remind them that the difference between a billion and a million is about a billion. Or ask them if they’d mind giving you a buck (a friend would probably say yes), then ask how about a thousand bucks. That’s a difference the average person would grasp.
I would absolutely love to be the victim of a wealth tax.
I suspect the high turnout in this blue wave election was mostly from former Trump voters turning out to punish Trump and his party. They voted Dem up and down the ballot, but when their actual beliefs are on the ballot (taxation, trans rights) they still vote according to their right-wing beliefs.