Plus sometimes banks have perks that keep the customer staying after all, and I believe I’ve heard of various scandinavian billionaires, for example, threatening to leave but then staying because their country offered them benefits beyond even their ungodly wealth
The amendment defines Retirement holdings, individually-owned assets, and other forms of personal savings to include “pensions; retirement accounts, including but not limited to 401 (k) accounts, 403(b) accounts, and all other individual retirement accounts; mutual funds; and all personal property, whether tangible or intangible, including but not limited to financial assets, investment accounts, business interests, digital assets, intellectual property, personal belongings, and other assets used to produce or collect income or savings for retirement or financial planning.”
Ballotpedia has not located a campaign in opposition to the ballot measure. You can share campaign information or arguments, along with source links for this information, with us at editor@ballotpedia.org.
If no one is declaring opposition, this will definitively pass.
“This morning we got the updated numbers for fiscal year 2026 for capital gains … it came in at $1.5 billion,” economist Dave Reich told state lawmakers earlier this month. “So a very significant increase, quite a bit above our forecast from what we had before.”
This is understating things by a fair bit. Last year this tax raised $584 million. So the revenue, which is a preliminary figure pending delayed returns, appears to have nearly tripled in one year. It quadrupled from the year before that.
This is not what the critics of tax-the-rich schemes said should happen. They predicted tax proceeds would deteriorate as rich people moved away or structured their finances to avoid paying it.
Yeah, rich people do what they want to do, leaving isn’t one of them. They make too much money where they are, why would they leave. They need us way more than we need them
What is it people say? “It doesn’t hurt to ask.” In this case, billionaires can save a pretty penny by paying a few “influencers” and “intellectuals” to doomsday the tax away. In reality, the pittance they pay in wealth tax is not reason enough for any of them to move.
Even if they have to pay a 5% one-time wealth tax (CA proposal), that’s nothing compared to what ordinary people have to pay in taxes, and ordinary people actually need that money.
With such wealth they should fall under military rules, you run, you run with wealth stolen from the country and could become a threat to the country, you will be classified as a traitor and enemy and will be pursued militarily. Total loss off all assets and potentially terminated. That would be the solution.
American citizens can’t escape the tax man. Unless you renounce your citizenship.
And if you’re REALLY that scared of a myth, put a progressive exit tax on their wealth. 100% over 1 billion. They built that wealth by exploiting America and its working class, so it’s just a repossession at that point.
Love the idea. Don’t even need to go after any personal wealth they have, just all the stocks. Chief exploitation manager leaving? Great. Get out. Take your Ferrari and your Villa. Keep it. But you get to stop exploiting people on the same day.
This is the funny thing: Realistically they won’t leave, they would simply leverage their wealth to support opposing parties, prop up their own political marionettes, invest their money in campaigns to ruin the credibility of their adversaries or simply letting them disappear as a measure of last resort.
They’ll get up, pack up all their factories and all physical assets and move one country over.
They have special moving companies that offer this service specifically.
Oh yeah, totally. It’s mostly about building a new factory somewhere where they are allowed to exploit the workers harder, and shutter the original one. They don’t just load the building into an Antonov or something.
Seriously. To the point that, any day now, there could be a movement that says, “we are not calling them billionaires any more, we’re calling them [insert appropriate opprobrium here]” and it would take
(since language is decided upon and endlessly evolved by the masses, whether we like it or not)
There’s a simple truth that more people need to hear.
With a few exceptions, police and the military do not serve billionaires, they serve the State.
The billionaires know this, which is why they work so hard to control or dismantle the State. But they are all cowards and use proxies that can be replaced.
If the people manage to overcome the active resistance to take control of the state, there’s very little the billionaires can do when the federal marshalls show up at their door.
See, the problem with the argument presented there, is that it completely ignores a bunch of what actually happened during that times frame.
The American Revolution was a complex time filled with compromise between those who actually believed in democracy, and those who were horrified by it.
And then the French Revolution happened, and the rich jackasses got scared. Well, the smart ones were scared.
Which is all meaningless because there have been 27 amendments since then, and those change the rules, letting more people have more of a voice.
Basically, the summation of the argument is thus, if voting didn’t matter, then the rich assholes wouldn’t be working so hard to keep you from doing it.
The billionaires know this, which is why they work so hard to control or dismantle the State. But they are all cowards and use proxies that can be replaced.
The State is the actual government itself, complete with federal employees and elected officials.
The oligarchs try to control who gets elected, and thus control the State through them. This is because they’re cowards who don’t want to put themselves at risk.
The rules that they have to play by, or else, says that the elected officials are in charge, not the billionaire backers.
This has been exploited for the benefit of the people in the past, but due to structural issues that can be fixed, it’s never quite gone far enough.
Derived from Yiddish, the verb means to waste time fooling around, doing nothing useful, to idle (or putter, which you could use, but it’s less derogatory).
Almost all of the biggest billionaires’ wealth is stock-based. You want to tax them? Raise the corporate tax rates and close loop-holes and exemptions.
It doesn’t matter where they move. Any company that earns money in the country has to pay taxes on that revenue. Its the win-win we don’t talk about.
I may have used the wrong term. Still, that’s where closing loop-holes comes in. If you want the government to be an engine that funnels wealth back down to the lower classes then you have to attack the upper economy that is the stock exchange. The easiest way to do that is corporate tax.
Individual taxes wont work because, again, most of their wealth is tied to investments by design. Same is true for retirement funds. God help us if they ever manage to get entitlements tied directly to index funds.
But anyway, corporate tax would decrease stock value, decrease billionaires net worth and put more debt pressure on billionaires I would assume, since their physical assets are usually purchased on credit granted based on their stock value. It would a a double whammy right? Their networth goes down and so does their credit score while theyre paying back the banks. Win-win
No matter how you slice it we have to cut through the bullshit and the first firewall protecting all that money is the low corporate tax rate and tax dodging.
If the US actually taxed someone like Bezos a fair amount to narrow the wealth gap, Bezos would just go to another country that will gladly accept his enormous amounts of money and help him move his assets & businesses over. The US would then lose a very large chunk of money, and as we all know, the US wants to be “The BEST country in the world”, so that’s not something they’d willingly let happen.
Maybe it’s not that simple, but I think that’s the general reason we haven’t seen the ultra-rich tax increases we all want. The politicians like money, the rich like political power, and the US wants to be the biggest and bestest. Just like a peanut butter jelly sandwich, you can’t seperate the peanut butter & the jelly once they’re put together.
The reason we haven’t seen those tax increases in the ultra-rich is that they have a direct line to the legislators that the common folk don’t have. They will spend a billion dollars if that will save them one dollar in expenses. It’s cheaper for them to buy a senator than to pay a fair amount of taxes.
What it sounds like you were saying was that the billionaires will leave with their assets and their businesses if they get taxed. That’s not why they don’t get taxed, it’s because the people in charge get paid to make sure they don’t have to.
I mean that is definitely a part of the problem. There are a lot of factors at play. I think it’s naive to think that politicians aren’t worried about the possibility of the rich leaving if they introduced higher taxes on top of other risks,, because of the fact that they get a shit ton of money from them.
The rich has paid the politicians to make it this way, and I’m saying the reason it hasn’t gone the other way is because the rich & the politicians are butt buddies. I feel like that’s the core of my argument so I’m not sure how it doesn’t make sense.
Plus none of this is certain anyway, they might flee, they might deal with the taxes, they might just say fuck it and get away with it because if you have billions of dollars, what’s stopping you from hiring a private task force/protective service of your own…?
The rich has paid the politicians to make it this way, and I’m saying the reason it hasn’t gone the other way is because the rich & the politicians are butt buddies. I feel like that’s the core of my argument so I’m not sure how it doesn’t make sense.
Ah my bad. I completely agree with this take, this is entirely correct as far as I can tell. I thought you were saying that the owning class will flee if taxes go up, which is what my response is in reference to (it’s also what this whole post is about).
Plus none of this is certain anyway, they might flee, they might deal with the taxes, they might just say fuck it and get away with it because if you have billions of dollars, what’s stopping you from hiring a private task force/protective service of your own…?
Nothing is ever certain, I don’t have a crystal ball, pretty much anything at all can happen. But we can look at the past and see what the owning class ends up doing when confronted with higher taxes. When we look at the past, when we had higher tax rates, they didn’t flee, so I don’t consider that a very likely possibility.
As long as they remain US citizens the tax laws apply. If they stop being US citizens make them register as foreign agents and publish all lobbying attempts. In addition we should make any organization that is not >50% owned by US citizens a foreign controlled entity and remove their ability to lobby in private. There are other changes that would need to happen like making it illegal not to be able to trace ownership of an organization to an individual but its better than nothing.
At this point almost anything is better than what were doing now. Its getting really old feeling like we’re a hostage to these people. If they are to tied to the economy as a whole that doing something as simple as making them pay a fair amount of tax they need to have assets stripped from them until they aren’t a theat any longer.
If they stop being US citizens make them register as foreign agents and publish all lobbying attempts. In addition we should make any organization that is not >50% owned by US citizens a foreign controlled entity and remove their ability to lobby in private. There are other changes that would need to happen like making it illegal not to be able to trace ownership of an organization to an individual but its better than nothing.
The problem I see with this argument is the “we need to do this, and then this, and then this”. If it were that simple to make changes, the rich would be taxed fairly already. We’re having trouble making one change, how would we accomplish a series of changes? I’m not defending the rich. I’m just saying how it is and arguing there’s more to it than just “kick the rich out” and/or “tax the rich”.
I probably just took this meme too seriously. And like you said, I’m feeling a hostage to these people as well.
I get what youre saying and I was just kind of thinking through loopholes to each idea. Not that it would ever happen but it would need to happen all at once with a very short time before it came into effect.
Lose what money? They’re bribing politicians to make their tax bill zero, and that’s on top of the money the government pays them to “do business.” Billionaires are a money pit. They are a drain on the communities they inhabit. And dont even get me started on the job creator bullshit.
The reason they dont move to another country is because the united states itself is a tax haven. Other countries either demand more taxes than the US or are much more insecure because of all the economic inequality caused by not taxing rich people.
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They’re not doing anything for me. Let them leave.
Like they left Mamdani’s New York 😄
Relevant Futurama
They can live on their yachts.
Even if it were true who cares? If they aren’t actually paying taxes then what is the point in having them?
“But look at all the jobs we’re creating!”
-Billionaire CEO who just announced a new round of layoffs
I think they view us as a bank. We need to make them money or they will transfer to another bank. Simple.
That is very very apt
Plus sometimes banks have perks that keep the customer staying after all, and I believe I’ve heard of various scandinavian billionaires, for example, threatening to leave but then staying because their country offered them benefits beyond even their ungodly wealth
TricklePiss down economics.Hold it all in till your kidneys fail before even sharing a sliver of their wealth economics.
They already trying to change California’s Constitution to prevent taxing their wealth:
https://ballotpedia.org/California_Prohibit_Taxes_on_Retirement_Holdings_and_Personal_Savings_Amendment_(2026)
Jesus, that’s an Orwellian bill name.
My biggest concern is:
If no one is declaring opposition, this will definitively pass.
At that point is there anything that doesn’t fit this definition? xdd
I guess income that goes to luxury things such as groceries and bills would still get taxed
WA’s rich are leaving? Another tax on wealth smashes records by tripling the amount coming in from last year
Yeah, rich people do what they want to do, leaving isn’t one of them. They make too much money where they are, why would they leave. They need us way more than we need them
What is it people say? “It doesn’t hurt to ask.” In this case, billionaires can save a pretty penny by paying a few “influencers” and “intellectuals” to doomsday the tax away. In reality, the pittance they pay in wealth tax is not reason enough for any of them to move.
Even if they have to pay a 5% one-time wealth tax (CA proposal), that’s nothing compared to what ordinary people have to pay in taxes, and ordinary people actually need that money.
The Epstein class deserve to be binned. They’re worse than garbage. They’re parasites.
With such wealth they should fall under military rules, you run, you run with wealth stolen from the country and could become a threat to the country, you will be classified as a traitor and enemy and will be pursued militarily. Total loss off all assets and potentially terminated. That would be the solution.
American citizens can’t escape the tax man. Unless you renounce your citizenship.
And if you’re REALLY that scared of a myth, put a progressive exit tax on their wealth. 100% over 1 billion. They built that wealth by exploiting America and its working class, so it’s just a repossession at that point.
Love the idea. Don’t even need to go after any personal wealth they have, just all the stocks. Chief exploitation manager leaving? Great. Get out. Take your Ferrari and your Villa. Keep it. But you get to stop exploiting people on the same day.
You know how billionaires always compete in having the most expensive house, yacht, space company or whatever.
Make them complete over the most expensive country to live in for billionaires. Show of your wealth by living here!
This is the funny thing: Realistically they won’t leave, they would simply leverage their wealth to support opposing parties, prop up their own political marionettes, invest their money in campaigns to ruin the credibility of their adversaries or simply letting them disappear as a measure of last resort.
Some leave but most won’t.
They’ll get up, pack up all their factories and all physical assets and move one country over. They have special moving companies that offer this service specifically.
Even Warren Buffet said most wealthy people don’t leave even during the time when the wealth tax was higher.
They move the factory though. Even if you don’t raise taxes.
Just to be clear: I made a joke. I don’t think moving factories is a thing :’) that’d be ludicrous.
Mostly only done during war. Ukraine is doing it, and Russia did it in WW2. Usually you also move the employees.
Oh yeah, totally. It’s mostly about building a new factory somewhere where they are allowed to exploit the workers harder, and shutter the original one. They don’t just load the building into an Antonov or something.
This is why I favour a global corporation tax.
Can we just skip to the eating billionaires part? There are clearly some lessons that need to be made so they may be learned.
I say someone will replace them if their business is needed. If it’s not needed then them leaving isn’t a threat.
Great, this way money will circulate in the economy again instead of getting hoarded by a small minority
There’s far fewer of them than us.
Seriously. To the point that, any day now, there could be a movement that says, “we are not calling them billionaires any more, we’re calling them [insert appropriate opprobrium here]” and it would take
(since language is decided upon and endlessly evolved by the masses, whether we like it or not)
Somehow this is really mesmerizing.
It’s got a strange This Is America choreography to it.
It’s the shorts.
Don’t try this at home unless you have any trash flung all over the yard.
Gary Stevenson would like a word in.
He is quite clear that yes they can leave, and we can tax them at the point where money is created instead of abroad where we have no influence.
They can move, but their properties remain over here
Must be an expensive trash bag. I’d be picking egg shells off the lawn after trying that.
What’s the use of billionaires if you can’t use their fancy trash bags when you bin them.
Fucking kill them already, they’re killing my country! I hope they suffer a lot and that their corpses be thrown on some vomit/poop pit.
I’ll help them pack.
New Jersey did just that. Their budget has been in a shortfall every year after they left.
Spending money on people is ok. Government running a surplus is theft from society.
Guess you never want to pay back the debt.
Are you new to public finance?
That garbage bag will eventually rupture spewing its insides everywhere if you do this regularly so do you want that to happen to billionaires too??
I would lick their intestines off the ground
My car has windshield wipers
If we’re not making money on them, why do we care if they stay? I say pay your part or good riddance!
God I hope so. Maybe they’ll all get in a rocket and try to leave Earth. A girl can dream
I’m even down for them to take their fake money with them, just gtfo
Will they promise to leave?
They make/made their money off of us. Don’t let them just leave with it.
There’s a simple truth that more people need to hear.
With a few exceptions, police and the military do not serve billionaires, they serve the State.
The billionaires know this, which is why they work so hard to control or dismantle the State. But they are all cowards and use proxies that can be replaced.
If the people manage to overcome the active resistance to take control of the state, there’s very little the billionaires can do when the federal marshalls show up at their door.
The modern state was created to serve the elites
See, the problem with the argument presented there, is that it completely ignores a bunch of what actually happened during that times frame.
The American Revolution was a complex time filled with compromise between those who actually believed in democracy, and those who were horrified by it.
And then the French Revolution happened, and the rich jackasses got scared. Well, the smart ones were scared.
Which is all meaningless because there have been 27 amendments since then, and those change the rules, letting more people have more of a voice.
Basically, the summation of the argument is thus, if voting didn’t matter, then the rich assholes wouldn’t be working so hard to keep you from doing it.
Then why aren’t federal Marshall’s showing at the door of every person in the Epstein files?
Then what is the distinction you are trying to draw between oligarchs and “the State”?
The State is the actual government itself, complete with federal employees and elected officials.
The oligarchs try to control who gets elected, and thus control the State through them. This is because they’re cowards who don’t want to put themselves at risk.
The rules that they have to play by, or else, says that the elected officials are in charge, not the billionaire backers.
This has been exploited for the benefit of the people in the past, but due to structural issues that can be fixed, it’s never quite gone far enough.
Where to another place where they will pay taxes to play..
There a clean version of the gif for memeing purposes?
And abandon our, supposed, “world-class” hegemony? Nah, they’ll just putts around like they always do anyways.
I think you meant “putz”
Derived from Yiddish, the verb means to waste time fooling around, doing nothing useful, to idle (or putter, which you could use, but it’s less derogatory).
The noun means a penis or a fool.
My knee would hurt for a month after a stunt like this.
indeed
Gonna need much bigger cans, a whole lot of bags, and a dull, rusty bone saw.
Almost all of the biggest billionaires’ wealth is stock-based. You want to tax them? Raise the corporate tax rates and close loop-holes and exemptions.
It doesn’t matter where they move. Any company that earns money in the country has to pay taxes on that revenue. Its the win-win we don’t talk about.
Companies pay taxes on profits though, not revenue. It’s easy to avoid taxes by spending down your profits.
I may have used the wrong term. Still, that’s where closing loop-holes comes in. If you want the government to be an engine that funnels wealth back down to the lower classes then you have to attack the upper economy that is the stock exchange. The easiest way to do that is corporate tax.
Individual taxes wont work because, again, most of their wealth is tied to investments by design. Same is true for retirement funds. God help us if they ever manage to get entitlements tied directly to index funds.
But anyway, corporate tax would decrease stock value, decrease billionaires net worth and put more debt pressure on billionaires I would assume, since their physical assets are usually purchased on credit granted based on their stock value. It would a a double whammy right? Their networth goes down and so does their credit score while theyre paying back the banks. Win-win
No matter how you slice it we have to cut through the bullshit and the first firewall protecting all that money is the low corporate tax rate and tax dodging.
If the US actually taxed someone like Bezos a fair amount to narrow the wealth gap, Bezos would just go to another country that will gladly accept his enormous amounts of money and help him move his assets & businesses over. The US would then lose a very large chunk of money, and as we all know, the US wants to be “The BEST country in the world”, so that’s not something they’d willingly let happen.
Maybe it’s not that simple, but I think that’s the general reason we haven’t seen the ultra-rich tax increases we all want. The politicians like money, the rich like political power, and the US wants to be the biggest and bestest. Just like a peanut butter jelly sandwich, you can’t seperate the peanut butter & the jelly once they’re put together.
The reason we haven’t seen those tax increases in the ultra-rich is that they have a direct line to the legislators that the common folk don’t have. They will spend a billion dollars if that will save them one dollar in expenses. It’s cheaper for them to buy a senator than to pay a fair amount of taxes.
That’s exactly what I said but maybe I was misunderstood. Or maybe the peanut butter jelly analogy wasn’t tasteful.
What it sounds like you were saying was that the billionaires will leave with their assets and their businesses if they get taxed. That’s not why they don’t get taxed, it’s because the people in charge get paid to make sure they don’t have to.
I mean that is definitely a part of the problem. There are a lot of factors at play. I think it’s naive to think that politicians aren’t worried about the possibility of the rich leaving if they introduced higher taxes on top of other risks,, because of the fact that they get a shit ton of money from them.
This argument would make sense if tax rates didn’t use to be much higher. They didn’t flee back then.
The rich has paid the politicians to make it this way, and I’m saying the reason it hasn’t gone the other way is because the rich & the politicians are butt buddies. I feel like that’s the core of my argument so I’m not sure how it doesn’t make sense.
Plus none of this is certain anyway, they might flee, they might deal with the taxes, they might just say fuck it and get away with it because if you have billions of dollars, what’s stopping you from hiring a private task force/protective service of your own…?
Ah my bad. I completely agree with this take, this is entirely correct as far as I can tell. I thought you were saying that the owning class will flee if taxes go up, which is what my response is in reference to (it’s also what this whole post is about).
Nothing is ever certain, I don’t have a crystal ball, pretty much anything at all can happen. But we can look at the past and see what the owning class ends up doing when confronted with higher taxes. When we look at the past, when we had higher tax rates, they didn’t flee, so I don’t consider that a very likely possibility.
As long as they remain US citizens the tax laws apply. If they stop being US citizens make them register as foreign agents and publish all lobbying attempts. In addition we should make any organization that is not >50% owned by US citizens a foreign controlled entity and remove their ability to lobby in private. There are other changes that would need to happen like making it illegal not to be able to trace ownership of an organization to an individual but its better than nothing.
At this point almost anything is better than what were doing now. Its getting really old feeling like we’re a hostage to these people. If they are to tied to the economy as a whole that doing something as simple as making them pay a fair amount of tax they need to have assets stripped from them until they aren’t a theat any longer.
The problem I see with this argument is the “we need to do this, and then this, and then this”. If it were that simple to make changes, the rich would be taxed fairly already. We’re having trouble making one change, how would we accomplish a series of changes? I’m not defending the rich. I’m just saying how it is and arguing there’s more to it than just “kick the rich out” and/or “tax the rich”.
I probably just took this meme too seriously. And like you said, I’m feeling a hostage to these people as well.
I get what youre saying and I was just kind of thinking through loopholes to each idea. Not that it would ever happen but it would need to happen all at once with a very short time before it came into effect.
Lose what money? They’re bribing politicians to make their tax bill zero, and that’s on top of the money the government pays them to “do business.” Billionaires are a money pit. They are a drain on the communities they inhabit. And dont even get me started on the job creator bullshit.
The reason they dont move to another country is because the united states itself is a tax haven. Other countries either demand more taxes than the US or are much more insecure because of all the economic inequality caused by not taxing rich people.
Let them go.