Billionaire Tax Officially Heads to Nov. 3 Ballot | Hacker News Reader

Billionaire Tax Officially Heads to Nov. 3 Ballot

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45 pointssimonpure63 comments

Even if it fails, California has taken a multi billion dollar tax hit from all of the wealth flight as a result of this. Not to mention that those people may take jobs with them, straight to Florida or Texas or other friendlier states.

These taxes are an abject disaster everywhere they're tried. France tried it and it was extremely bad for them.

The cash raised from the tax is dwarfed by the wealth flight, every time.

Napkin math for just the people who have left already over 5 years show $50 billion in lost tax revenue. Probably far more in indirect losses (jobs, consumption, etc).

You need to remember that the proponents of this kind of thing WANT rich assholes to leave. They consider that an environmental social improvement.

If you think a few billionaires moving to other states would take the Silicon Valley with them and it would be easy then let's see it play out.

Starbucks is shifting corporate jobs from Washington state to Tennessee as a result of this rhetoric. Chicago's financial industry was famously carved out due to the same kind of rhetoric, with Citadel moving to Florida, causing massive damage to the city and a huge financial hole (the city can barely fund the CTA, and it nearly collapsed in 2025).

You sure showed those billionaires by destroying the jobs of thousands of middle class workers and losing out on the tax revenue that was funding public transit and critical infrastructure. Nice!

You ought to link those things together a little better. The CTA propped up by a single finance firm???? Cmon

You need to install capital controls first.

California is not a country. States cannot install capital controls.

Yes, that's correct. I'm talking about the other examples mentioned in the post.

If you won't do anything about the wealth, the top 1%, or top 0.1% will own more and more, until they own everything. Literally. There is no other outcome possible

Over the last 100 years the wealthy have expanded their gap between themselves and everyone else AND poverty rates have become the lowest at any time in history.

Seems to me that the status quo is allowing billions of the poorest people to afford food, shelter and more.

When you contextualize it that way, your argument looks like jealousy. For your argument to make logical sense, you must show that the poor are worse off than they were 100 years ago. But that's completely false. Extreme poverty was almost eradicated completely in that time.

You've got the 2nd wealthiest man in the world who created a company that sells essential goods at margins between 0 and 5%, far lower than typical 30% margins in retail. The poor have benefited profoundly from this, as their buying power has never been better (not to mention the lifts in living standards, wages, etc).

I actually think billionaire flight is a good thing. Billionaires do not contribute to their community. Sure some tax accountant and some security people will lose their jobs, but this not matter for regular folk.

If nothing else, billionaires flight is a positive thing.

I am hoping all the billionaires leave my Washington state as a result of the millionaire tax - it may become a normal state like Oregon.

And what about the jobs they take with them? Starbucks shifting corporate jobs to Tennessee is a pretty local and recent example.

The average Starbucks corporate worker is squarely middle class. Their job is leaving as a result of this rhetoric.

Starbucks HQ moving to Tennessee is not caused by WA state millionaire tax - Burito Boy was hired on August 2024 well before the millionaire tax was even envisioned. Part of his compensation is predicated on these costs savings - and these were part of Burrito Boy’s negotiations before he even signed up his employment contract. So this move has nothing to do with the millionaire tax.

And just to let you know- Starbucks is not that popular in Seattle. They have been closing stores right and left in Seattle to the point where I only know store that is open. Seattle is not missing them that much.

[edit some typos]

Aren’t those billionaires the founders and CEOs of all the tech companies in Silicon Valley? And the VC firms that get them off the ground.

Maybe it would be fine for them to leave, but I’m pretty sure you want their companies to stay.

Maybe not. 50% of the tech companies moving out of Silicon Valley would probably improve traffic, lower housing costs etc. I’m pretty sure the cities that host them enjoy the tax revenue they bring in.

A lot of people that work (and thus benefit) from these tech companies are from out of state. Local people have to put up with insane housing costs because of tech work.

In Seattle at least some of the tech work is receding already because of layoffs. Which started to lower housing costs: landlords are starting to give 4 or 6 weeks of free rent.

More of this please.

'Trickle down economics will start working any day now, do you really want to miss out on our billionaire trickle?'

Leaving California means stepping away from the highest concentration of billion-dollar outcome creation in the U.S. Over the past ~40 years, California has produced on the order of ~120–200 billionaire-producing startups, versus ~15–35 in Texas and ~10–25 in Florida, depending on how you define origin.

Using standard venture-style risk and reward thinking, the data favors staying. The distribution of extreme upside outcomes remains heavily concentrated in California. Now if your a done/finished investor/creator or you have to be cost conscious it makes sense to leave the dream state and move to the retirement home states that cater to the has been class versus the creator class. No shame in having to be cost conscious or being ready to give up and fade into the retirement home of states lifestyle.

Florida has never had an income tax. With few exceptions, most of its wealthy are retirees or heirs, who don't have much income anyway.

Texas does not have an income tax. Despite its century of oil wealth, it has fewer billionaires than CA or NY.

These states don't have income taxes because they're unpleasant places to live at the best of times and nobody would choose to live their if they had to pay income taxes.

Florida is an unpleasant place to live?

Azim Premji donates every dollar he makes over 1 billion for the last 20 years.

Mckenzie Scott is working through donating her share. Same for Melinda Gates, Dustin Moskovitz & Cari Tuna.

Warren Buffet plans to donate the larger part to charity.

Let's keep building the good examples so the alternative (power consolidation across generations) is unthinkable for future generations.

Good examples are great. But it doesn't solve the problem. The only way to fix this busted economy where inequality is increasing and few, wealthy individuals are gaining insane amounts of political power through spending is systemic change in the structure of our tax base.

Agreed. We could posit that the biggest impact a billionaire could have to improve the world would be to lobby for increased taxes.

I feel like the first dude is a good argument for taxing billionaires. He's still doing alright at what would be a 100% tax over a billion.

Never mind that when we tax billionaires, we (the people) decide what to spend it on.

Do we though? I’ve never been consulted. I would like us to stop making Abram’s Tanks that the army doesn’t need and have repeatedly asked us to stop providing.

I think the high speed rail was a mistake, an illustration of all the reasons we can’t build infrastructure. I’d have preferred that we spent the money fixing those things rather than throwing it into the black hole.

The F35 is a mistake. Nobody asked me to weigh in a decade ago when it became obvious that.

Some people work to control costs. Those are not the same ones who get elected on that platform. The last famous attempt actually cost us more than it saved.

I would say that I’ve ever had the chance to decide what to spend it on.

Your only chance of course is when you elect people to represent you in our government.

Why not tax the gov though? "Nobody should have that much control" means you must first have limited government and some mechanism to stop unstable governance dynamics which allow for capture. Currently it seems like billionaires are one way to stop that.

HN just had a post about the craigslist founder donating over half billion dollars to charity. see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48588216

What do you mean "let's" like we're the billionaires? The ultra wealthy have had over a century (in only this country!) to read The Gospel of Wealth. They're not going to do it. And it's fine to admit that.

>The Gospel of Wealth

The book from anti-union Carnegie, which recommended to his fellow wealthy that they uplift society while actively undermining the efforts of workers to improve their own lives?

By "let's" I mean us, as voters, as citizens.

"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle." (Edmund Burke)

A "one-time" tax to fund recurring health care and educational expenses is an obvious lie.

All of the wealth has been taxed before, often multiple times. Adding another layer sure seems like overkill.

Well, no, it hasn't. Much of the wealth is in the form of unrealized capital gains. It won't be taxed until it becomes a realized capital gain, that is, until the underlying asset is sold.

The wealth has barely been taxed at all. Wealth comes from holding assets not from labor, and asset ownership is barely taxed:

1. stocks and commercial real estate are allowed to appreciate without taxation (unlike personal residences outside Cali),

2. multinationals wrote for themselves obscure tax rules so they end up paying almost no tax,

3. interest expense for companies and ultra high net worth individuals is subtracted from taxable income (for personal mortgages the interest expense deduction is capped)

4. Rich people organize their assets so estate taxes do not tax their estates when they die and thus their wealth goes to their children.

As you can see wealth is barely taxed.

Um no.

"The income tax base captures 60 % of economic income of the top 1 % of wealth-holders."

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...

Be honest. It has been taxed once at 1/3 the rate that wages are taxed. Capital gains gets taxed at 10% (which is how rich people get their money). Poor people pay about 30% of their income in tax.

Our tax system disproportionately favors the wealthy. I know. I’ve been poor, I’ve worked minimum wage. Now I make much more money and the I’ve watched the tax system favor me more the more I make.

I mean, let's do it. But it seems more straightforward to tax wealth as capital gains when it's used as collateral for liquid assets (low interest loans, lines of credit, buying twitter).

I hope all billionaires will depart for that island in Florida to bunk with Bozos and Kushner. That poor island will probably sink under the weight of so much ego.

Love it.

In fact, we should have expanded it to be a "millionaire tax" where everyone who has a home worth more than $1M needs to pay a one time $50k+ tax to the highly efficient state government. I'm sure they can easily figure out how to sell a small fraction of their home to cover it.

If there is one thing that history has proven, I think it's how valuable dry taxation is for everyone in the long term.

I mean, people already do pay property taxes on homes? So this isn’t a very good retort.

In California, it's capped at a knowable amount when you buy the home and pegged at the sale price. You know what it is and what it always will be when the transaction happens. The people whom have owned a house now worth a million for 30 years probably pay a few grand a year and always have. Dry taxing the technical value of their assets today would destroy millions of families. The point is that dry taxation is generally pretty stupid.

1. The tax is not pegged at the sale price. What prop 13 actually does is limit the amount of appreciation the state can recognize for tax purposes.

2. There are lots of states/cities in the US that do not cap the appreciation of your house for tax purposes, and I don’t think it destroys millions of families. In fact the California cap is generally seen as a terrible policy because it distorts the housing market

Any why should Prop 13 apply to commercial real estate?

I wouldn’t call it stupid, but it is a policy choice. On the other side, why should Grandma pay 5% of the property taxes as the new couple next door while receiving the same access to public services, while also pushing another family to live farther away?

This is an idiotic take.

The difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars is basically a billion dollars. At this scale, it’s the same comparison between a billion dollars and a homeless person.

No billionaire owns a single physical house that is their entire worth and that is also their sole form of shelter.

Now if you are proposing a tax on all secondary homes worth $1M or more... I'm listening.

In the USA "all men are created equal". Owning money should allow you more representation than not owning money. Companies/institutions should not be allowed to spend money on politics, and a flat tax would solve this.

41 of the 56 men who signed the document containing that statement were slave owners.

and yet now the constitution bans slavery

i find the "but the founding fathers had slaves" to just be nihilistic nonsense

the united states was a manifestation of enlightenment philosophy that persists to this day (despite attacks on it)

"and yet now the constitution bans slavery"

Unless you're a prisoner convicted of a crime. Stating that the founders of the United States owned slaves is not "nihilistic nonsense", it's an important distinction to note that they sought political power for themselves, and no one else. The phrase "all men are created equal" should be interpreted as "all white land-owning men are created equal"

But the constitution doesn't say: "all white land-owning men are created equal"

It said "all men are created equal". It took a long time to get to this point in human history and it's worth defending.

That was the declaration of Independence, not the Constitution. It has no force of law, but is certainly asperational.

the declaration of independence has some weight in the common law

Your elementary school social studies teacher failed you; the statement you referenced is written in the Declaration of Independence, not the US Constitution. The parent OP that I first replied to stated that "Owning money should allow you more representation than not owning money". This is a position not at all worth defending, and completely at odds with the concept of "all men are created equal".

To be fair. I grew up in Ireland and have never lived in the USA. I just admire the protections for the individual that your country aims for. Anyway I appreciate the correction :)

This is such an embarrassingly childish viewpoint.

Stop embarrassing yourself.

It took literal war to get there.

it also took a war to reify enlightenment philosophy as our government

> Owning money should allow you more representation than not owning money.

Fine, I’ll bite: Why?

The rich are always going to manipulate politics. Maybe it'd be better for them to directly influence politics with their names and votes attached to policies, as opposed to hiding in the shadows and using representatives as fall guys.

Think we'd all be better off if the whole lobbying caste was dismantled and there were simpler paper trails.

Why not let Bezos, Musk et al spend £1bil/year to sit on the senate?

"The rich are always going to manipulate politics."

It's why many are suggesting billionaires not exist at all.

> Owning money should allow you more representation than not owning money

The capitalist's manifesto

I think I heard that the Carthaginians used to auction off political positions, and the proceeds were effectively the taxes which ran society. While on the surface it sounds like a ridiculous concept, maybe it'd be better if we just cut out all the middlemen. At least policy could be directly connected to the paymasters.

Whild I hate the idea of a zillionaire tax, and I largely think good allocators should allocate, I also recognize that simply pricing things and allowing them to be bought is unstable in many cases.

If you can use it to take over a country it must be stopped.

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