This election cycle, California residents will be considering Proposition 40. That is a proposal mounted by the healthcare workers’ union (SEIU-UHW) that hopes to fund Medi-Cal, healthcare services, education, and food assistance programs through a one-time, five percent tax on California residents with assets of more than a billion dollars.
A “billion” is a lot.
Just for kicks, imagine you are a person who earns $100,000 per year. You would be doing better than most individual American workers, the Mean (Average) Annual Wage being $69,770. That’s more money than a lot of the world’s workers make. The Mean Annual Wage globally is hard to figure precisely, because a lot of the world is so poor that institutions measuring stuff have not been reliably established in those areas. But it is somewhere between $12,000 and $14,000 per year.
Now, of course, we don’t all live with the same economies and pricing structures, but any way you look at it, hard-working people aren’t swimming in money. And yet, we live in a time when there are 3,428 billionaires in the world.
They didn’t make their billion in a single year. Only Donald Trump can do that. He has made $1.8 billion since assuming office in January 2025.
If you were to make $100,000 in a single year, you would be one-tenth of the way toward making a million in that year. So, if you could just turn your 365-day year into a year with 3,650 days, you’d have a shot at a million. That’s a lot of overtime, but if you were shooting for a billion dollar year, like Donald, you’d need more like ten-thousand one-hundred-thousand (10,000 x 100,000 = 1,000,000,000) days in your year. To be like Donald, you’d need to work 3,652,425 days in one year (counting leap days) to pull down your billion.
Now, of course, nobody makes that kind of money in a single year – accept Donald, who is at another level of honest earnings.
But let’s turn that on its head. If you have assets of a billion dollars, and these do-gooders in the healthcare union rob you of five percent of your hard-earned wealth, you owe these bastards $50 million! F**k that, I’m moving to Nevada! The healthcare workers thought of that, so under Proposition 40, the wealthy can move, but they still must pay.
Gavin Newsom and both candidates for California governor oppose this one-time billionaire tax, and whenever there is reluctance to claw-back some of the over-gains of the ridiculously wealthy you get the same reasoning – they’ll move away. The parasites – nobody earns money without it somehow being on the backs of others – will go to states like Nevada and Florida and Texas that protect the wealthy and under-provide for the non (wealthy, that is). If you are wealthy, you get your services no matter where you go, even in areas where services are not generally provided. (I’m looking at you, Florida.)
From my point of view, as a Californian, I say good riddance to you. The ultra-wealthy are hiding their incomes no matter where they live, and California is a state of endless backfill. We need tax overhaul in this state, to be sure, just like we do nationally (and I’ll get to that), but California is unlike any other state in the union. It has an environment and an atmosphere that is unparalleled. The energy in this state is alive, however grumpy our uber-elites may be, and California has an evergreen quality.
Where I live, there is this observation made by property maintainers that if you cut a limb off a tree, the tree just grows back stronger. I think that’s California. Cut the dead wood, I say, and see what blossoms.
(Dead wood? Billionaires are dead wood? We have this myth in our predatory capitalistic system, which exists entirely on the circulation of money, that wealthy people create jobs. That’s not true. Spending creates jobs, which is why it behooves a society to feed those people – the poor – who place all of their income right back into circulation. They make the world go around, versus the wealthy, whose assets mostly reside in interest-bearing accounts and hard assets. They create jobs only when they can exploit markets or pirate a piece of a pie. Think about it, when you consider starting a business, you look to find where there is a need that you can fill. You don’t get a lot of wealthy people who just launch a venture in the hopes of creating a need. It happens. You do get rich dreamers, but they almost always fail, and those are the wealthy who soon enough aren’t.)
All that said, why are progressives like Gavin Newsom (I guess he’s progressive) opposed to Proposition 40?
Newsom and the others aren’t opposed to a one-time tax on billionaires, they just believe it should be done at the national, not the state level.
I think there is the notion, at the state level, that were the state to appreciate a one-time windfall to address shortcomings in the current delivery system, that there would follow a need to maintain the healthcare system at the recovered level, and with no more one-time windfalls coming in the state would find itself in financial difficulty.
I guess the argument is that, at the state level, we can’t afford to do better.
The whole thing is ridiculous, a malady of a society and a system where priorities are just really screwed up.
I am not sure how we get the ultra-rich, the elites, to bow to a public system that presently has no choice other than to bow to them.
