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.
Why the fuck would teachers oppose a billionaire tax?
This is absolutely the stupidest fucking outcome for prop 40, genuinely. No, it was not and is not perfect. But literally any downwards wealth redistribution is an objective good, full stop. Anyone who voted for this who isnt, at poorest, a few tens of millions away from being a billionaire, is an abject idiot.
The rich Hollywood elite should pay their fair share. Except for Tom Hanks. He is a national treasure! /s
Personally I don’t believe we have enough culture wars and social division. We need more of that stuff bombarding us from every media outlet possible, just as the billionaires like it. That’s why they bought up mass media— so they can reach us 24/7 with their enlightened takes on humanity and community.
Who wants a return to the days we had decent infrastructure, convenient public transportation, and well-funded education? Not me! Who are we to stop billionaires from using their excess money to buy politicians and Supreme Court justices, and the endless lawyers needed to lobby nonstop for preferential treatment. If they want to destroy the occasional environment or pay to rape a child once in a while— well they’re so rich they earned the right! Way to go CA— never let billionaires lose their stranglehold on society!
There’s a reason USA has become a shithole, and that is that most Americans are dumb, and actually think 1% of the population deserve 50% of the wealth.
With that mentality, it is impossible to create real progress in USA.After all, why would you want a small group of powerful people who hate you and work to destroy your quality of life to leave your state?
People really forget how good we had it when we had only like 4 billionaires. Thats when small businesses thrived and we had so many options for everything. Now only a handful of stores
First they came for the billionaires, and I did not speak out, because I was not a billionaire.
(That’s sarcasm with a capital S just to be clear)
Then they came for the billionaires and I spoke out because wont anyone think of the poor billionaires?
We have to keep trying. We have to fight wealth inequality.
Many families are going with less because everyone is pulling together to help those who are really struggling.
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.
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.
