California’s ‘Wealth’ Tax Wouldn’t Even Cover the Cost of Fraud:
After losing a $100 billion surplus, Dems want a $100 billion wealth tax.
SEIU, the massively powerful and radical health care union, claims that California faces a ‘healthcare collapse’ due to what it calls ‘federal funding cuts’ and only an ’emergency’ 5% tax on the total net worth of anyone with over $1 billion in assets will save the state’s health care.
There are no actual ‘cuts’, what SEIU and much of California’s Democrat machine falsely describes as cuts is actually MediCal (California’s name for Medicaid) getting work requirements for healthy adults and paperwork requirements expected to force illegal aliens off MediCal.
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s efforts to provide free health care to illegal aliens is what actually endangered the state’s health care funding. The only people losing MediCal are the people who shouldn’t have it in the first place. California Democrats are however too beholden to SEIU and its rival the California Nurses Association to graciously accept the much needed reforms.
Instead, SEIU is lobbying to get its ‘California Billionaire Tax Act’ on the ballot while promising that it can make up for what it describes as $100 billion in federal ‘cuts’. That’s actually over $1 trillion across a decade. SEIU’s own fact sheet for the Billionaire Tax Act claims that California’s billionaires “hold a combined wealth of $2 trillion.”
That means the 5% tax would have to go up to 50% to cover the state’s decade-long hole.
How much would the ‘wealth tax’ actually bring in? The California Legislative Analysis (which despite its non-partisan claim tends to be biased leftward) offers no specific revenue estimates, but instead states that the “state probably would collect tens of billions of dollars”. That’s far short of the $100 billion being implicitly promised by the radical health care union.
But the $2 trillion wealth estimate depends on stock value and much of it, especially for startups, is hypothetical. Forcing massive amounts of stock sales would play havoc with stock value (and expected revenues) and the entire economy. Rather than generating $100 billion in revenue, such a wealth tax would likely result in trillions of dollars in losses to the national economy.
Not that it matters because, as the analysis warns, “it is likely that some billionaires decide to leave California” and then “the income taxes they currently pay to the state would go away with their departure.” SEIU may have a copy of Das Kapital, but they never read the fable about the goose who laid the golden egg. Instead of picking up $100 billion in one time revenue, California would take a massive hit to its annual revenues while picking up very little from the wealth tax.
What would the estimated “tens of billions of dollars” amount to? Not even enough to cover the cost of fraud that is eating California alive and which Trump’s Medicaid reforms are trying to fix.
California lost $32.6 billion to unemployment fraud alone. That official figure is generally assumed to be on the low side out of the estimated $170 billion in total payments.
Gov. Newsom’s bellicose press office recently responded to revelations of fraud by boasting that the state had recovered $5.9 billion in unemployment fraud. This is a misleading figure because the recovery mostly refers to freezing payments that had not yet been spent rather than recovering money that had already been stolen.
And $5.9 billion out of $32.6 billion is not even a fifth of the money that had been stolen. --->READ MORE HERE
As California debates a billionaire tax, class lines begin to harden | Opinion
A union representing health care workers has proposed California put a one-time income tax on the state’s billionaires to garner revenue for the state’s health care system, as federal funds are increasingly threatened by the Trump administration.
The Billionaire’s Tax is proposed by Service Employees International Union-United (SEIU) Healthcare Workers West, a union that has more than 120,000 members. SEIU wants to put an initiative on the 2026 state ballot to force the California’s richest residents — around 200 billionaires total — into paying a one-time tax of 5%, with five years to send the proceeds to Sacramento. Projections estimate the tax would raise around $100 billion for health care, education and food assistance.
The debate is now on the front lines of the growing class war between average Californians and the wealthiest 1%. It also puts Gov. Gavin Newsom in a tight spot between billionaires and the working class labor union that proposed the tax at a time when he will likely seek to tout the state’s robust economy as a selling point in his presumable, though unconfirmed, 2028 presidential campaign.
Yet for all of Newsom’s public back-patting and posturing to the contrary, the state currently has a projected budget deficit of around $18 billion. (You know what would help with that?)
“The new federal budget passed by Congress slashes $100 billion from California’s health care funding over the next five years, pushing our state towards a healthcare collapse,” states SEIU’s website. “We can’t let this happen.”
Bye bye billionaires?
The proposal is causing California billionaires to panic, and some are even making threats to leave the state and take their money with them.
Peter Thiel, noted bestie of President Donald Trump and alleged government surveillance facilitator, has threatened to pack up his “software” company, Palantir, and leave the state in protest, while fellow billionaire and Google co-founder, Larry Page, has also reportedly threatened to leave. (Thiel’s personal wealth, by the way, is approximately $26 billion, while Page’s worth is around $257 billion, both according to Fortune Magazine, making Page the third-richest man in the world after a Google stock surge earlier this year.)
According to my back-of-the-napkin calculations, after the proposed tax, Thiel would still have around $26 billion and Page would still have about $244 billion. Not too shabby.
Newsom has historically and unsurprisingly been on the side of the billionaires in this matter. He once called the idea of taxing the wealthiest “shameful.” But Suzanne Jimenez, chief of staff for Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West, told the San Francisco Chronicle that the billionaires’ threats to leave the state were “familiar Chicken Little argument(s).” --->READ MORE HERE
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