Author Topic: California Hates Your Freedom So Much They Want To Tax You For Leaving  (Read 254 times)

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Offline Elderberry

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Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog 1/30/2023

One-Party Democratic California is so desperate for cash they want to tax people for leaving.

    Desperate to stem the stampede of cash cows — affluent residents — out of their state, they are trying to pass an exit tax for households with assets of $50 million or more. Current residents would have to keep paying for years after they have decamped to less hostile states.

    Heaven forbid that these legislators should instead come to terms with the reasons so many productive residents flee or what they could do to make their state a more attractive destination for people and businesses. They aren’t much concerned with that, merely with stopping the flight of all that revenue. If they cared about the livelihoods of the people leaving, they probably would have governed in a way that didn’t prompt people to head for the exits.

This is probably unconstitutional nine ways to Sunday. Wealth tax, Ex-Post Facto law, taxation without representation, etc. It’s also likely to be counterproductive, as rich people are not only likely to leave the state preemptively to avoid being subject to it, but are exactly the people that can hire top-notch lawyers to get it overturned.

Louis Rossmann, who recently fled New York City to Austin, has additional thoughts:

•  “They are showing and demonstrating here they have no confidence in their ability to govern better, or in their ability to actually give the customers of that state what they want, because they’re telling you ‘We’re not going to make things better. Rather, if you leave we are going to figure out a way to fine you.'”

•  “It demonstrates a sick ideology that’s both just authoritarian and disgusting in nature.”

•  “It’s not like [the tax rates in California and New York] just spiked up insanely over the past one or two years, they’ve been higher than the tax rate in Texas and Florida for as long as I’ve been alive, by a fairly large margin. This is not news. It’s something else in addition to that, and they don’t even appear to be interested in trying to figure out what that is.”

•  “Florida and Texas…have not had income tax for a very long time.”

•  “Maybe it would make sense to actually ask people what changed over the past two or three or five years that caused you to decide that you want to move your business and get the bleep out.”

•  “I could tell you from experience that losing half of your employees, putting all your stuff in a truck, carting it across the country. and spending months putting it all back together is insanely stressful, and not something that I’m going to do so I could save six or eight percent of my income tax.”

More: https://www.battleswarmblog.com/?p=53988


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