“Why in the hell is Gavin Newsom not supporting California’s sensible one-time billionaire tax that would create massive revenue for a state that not only has the most billionaires, but ones that definitely don’t pay their fair share?”
Because he wants some of these goons to finance his Presidential campaign, and this is why he’s gone out of his way to cater to the richest people in the state. That’s the real reason.
[It’s also why I’m not supporting him in the Democratic presidential primary of 2028 because we simply cannot have another 8 years of “centrist” Dem politics where absolutely nothing substantial gets done and then we just pass the time until the next Republican comes in and destroys what’s left of the social safety net/American dream.]
All the stated reasons he (or Xavier Becerra, the uninspired front runner to succeed Newsom) is against this are BS because the one-time tax (that’s also retroactive) isn’t going to cause the oligarchs to “leave the state.” They’ll have to pay it whether they move or not, and many of them have businesses where they cannot leave the state or they already would’ve moved to Texas or wherever if they were really that worried about taxes. The idea that this would also “hurt jobs” is equally ridiculous because people like Larry Ellison/David Ellison are trying to use their un-taxed billions to monopolize Hollywood and layoff literally tens of thousands of people. Overly-concentrated wealth kills jobs because people buy up competitors and lay people off.
It’s estimated the “lost revenue” of having a few dozen billionaires move out of petulant opposition would “cost” the state a few hundred million (and even the idea of this tax will cause most of those myopic ones to leave anyway whether it passes or not), but the one-time tax on them would increase revenue by tens of billons. The math is very simply in favor of California, but Newsom just doesn’t want to do it because of his ambitions to run for POTUS. That’s the only reason he’s really opposed to this, and it has nothing to do with what’s best for California.
Sidenote: All the “armchair economists” talking about how the rich pay all the taxes anyway and don’t need to pay more actually have no idea what they’re talking about. Many of them pay a lower effective tax rate than the 99.9% percent (for just one example, only the first 185K of their income is subject to social security taxes—which for a billionaire means less than 1% of their income is even taxed on something most pay 100% of their income towards), and some of them live off of low-interest bank loans with their stocks as collateral so they don’t even pay traditional income taxes. The fact that this one-time tax is likely more than 10-times their “annual” taxes also proves they’re paying nowhere near what they should be and this would undoubtedly be more. Per usual, most people don’t know even basic facts about how the rich live, but would reflexively defend their right to do so anyway. No wonder we ended up with the robber baron POTUS and the world’s first trillionaire at roughly the same time.