POWERLINE 1/29/2026
California’s long goodbye continues apace, as that state’s leftists are promoting a wealth tax on the rich, to be enacted by ballot proposition. We are only after billionaires, they say. Just give us five percent of your money, they say, and we will be satisfied. We won’t come back for more.
No one believes them.
Now California’s rich are packing up to leave:
Over the last week, I spoke with 21 billionaires about the looming prospect of a wealth tax. We discussed whether they left or are planning to leave California (most of them are), what a wealth tax means for the technology industry, and finally how, if at all, they plan to fight back.
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The ballot proposition was constructed in such a way that it can technically not solve any of the stated problems it was ostensibly written to address — chief among them, filling a massive budget hole in Medi-Cal (the state’s Medicaid program) following California legislation that guaranteed permanent funding for illegal immigrant health care.
The union that represents health care workers is the main proponent of the wealth confiscation measure.
The futility of the ballot proposition has left most men impacted with a sense that the ballot proposition’s true purpose is to humiliate them, disrupt their personal lives, and hurt their companies.
They are starting to catch on.
Given especially the proposition’s dangerous language surrounding “control,” founders of private companies in particular, with their armies of lawyers investigating this thing, believe the proposition, as written, could actually bankrupt them.
More:
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2026/01/goodbye-california.php
