Wealth taxes are a symptom of a broken tax system. If you let someone get to hundreds of billions in net worth and then realize they haven’t been appropriately paying back into the system, it’s already too late. Like the article says they can simply say “no” in a variety of ways, from fighting in court to simply leaving.
> If you let someone get to hundreds of billions in net worth and then realize they haven’t been appropriately paying back into the system
This is to once again mistake net worth for money. Net worth is not real. It is not a good measure of the money someone may be able to realise. They do not have hundreds of billions. There is nothing to tax until they sell some shares.
I dont know why it's so complicated to just say "Money is Money when it's Liquid, tax it then". Any loans on wealth should be taxed..nationwide.
But even in California's case this doesn't feel like anything anybody would object to. Given how much California Billionaires liquidate using loans on their wealth, I bet, they could do a middle class tax cut too to offset it a little bit too.
I am little baffled as to why the politicos haven't latched on to this whole-heartedly. You can still proudly say you're taxing Billionaire wealth. Because you are! Just more sensibly.
Larry Page owns about 5% of Alphabet, which is worth $4T, so he has $200B give or take. Which part of that do you think reflects a "broken tax system"? Companies should get kneecapped if their market cap gets too high? Founders shouldn't be allowed to keep even a single digit percent of the company?
The broken part is that there is third world-level poverty on the streets outside Google’s offices, working class people cannot afford to live in the Bay Area, and a fifth of California lives in poverty.
If the $100B+ was created through ownership of a company and is unrealized wealth, how would you have taxed it if not through a wealth tax? Nobody is getting to $100B by way of income.
If you let someone get to hundreds of billions in net worth and then realize they haven’t been appropriately paying back into the system, it’s already too late. Like the article says they can simply say “no” in a variety of ways, from fighting in court to simply leaving.
And care about the rule of law. You cannot pass retroactive laws, you cannot pass laws that target individual people. If you pass a general law (which could very well have reasonable objections), people have to have a chance to leave.
"I'm passing this law that is effective the exact millisecond I sign it, tough shit if you don't like it" is tyranny and despotism. But based on your comment I think you know that.
Old voters like the house they brought 20 years ago for 100k being worth 1.5 million today. They also like not paying taxes on that 1.4m in wealth accumulation.
I think not wanting to pay some yearly tax on that $1.4 million because the government pretends that the same as having $1.4M cash in the bank, or making $1.4M in a year, is fine.
Not wanting to pay the property taxes associated with a $1.5M home is the problem.
Which is why we also have things like a deferred property tax program! The way to "solve" the problems Prop 13 addresses would be to expand programs like that, but homeowners—disproportionately active middle- and upper-middle-class voters—want to have their cake and eat it too.
But neglects to consider why it won a majority of votes. Why did it? And how does Prop 13 relate to the more recent Prop 19, which substantially weakened it?
I agree the proposed wealth tax is a bad idea, but raising property taxes is probably not viable. They are incredibly unfavorable to voters. No one who owns a home wants to pay rent, that's why you buy in the first place.
Personally, this is why I am fine with higher income or sales taxes.
If the tax is calculated based on residency at the time it was earned or granted rather than when it vested or was sold then it doesn’t matter if they leave.
I think the point of the article is correct; the issue with CA is everyone wants to live there, including rich people. If we try and tax them then they'll leave just long enough to not pay state income tax, if we tax property values then the state actually gets the tax and doesn't miss out on job creation or future revenue.
Red states have implemented low income tax with heavy property taxes (think Texas) with great results. and although I'm sure California would just manage to mess it up it's a great idea.
I would not frame Texas as having great results. If anything places should get as little like Texas as they possibly can. I mean they send you to jail for an abortion or a gram of weed. It's living under Shari-yall law.
The lack of a progressive income tax structure gives texas few levers to ameliorate budget issues without cutting services or raising property taxes. It doesn't help the current governor seems to be pushing city budgets to the brink by also cutting off the property tax lever.
Out of curiosity, why couldn't property taxes be progressive? What stops Texas from having different tax rates based on the value of the property?
It even seems like it avoids a lot the pit falls the uber-wealthy use to avoid most progressive income taxes. Its easy to disguise income as something else. Property, though, is right out in the open. The state can easily audit and value property and send the bill. No matter how fancy the accounting, that bill will eventually reach the person "consuming" that property.
In practice, at least from what I've read, in TX, the largest/wealthiest companies get the biggest/best tax breaks (eg Tesla), and end up paying proportionally less, so it's somewhat regressive.
1. If wealth was only motivated by taxes and was going to leave, it would've left already. Fact is, billionaires don't want to live in Tennessee;
2. Nobody is doing the right thing to tackle any of this, including California.
The article mentions California has land and that's the key point. Unfortunately, California homeowners have been coopted into voting against their own interests to raise property values. If the house you bought in SF in 1975 for $80,000 is now worth $3M, you still only own 1 housing unit's worth of wealth. And that housing cost is an input into everything you need to buy because all the workers required for those things have to be paid high enough to pay those exorbitant rents.
Let me repeat that: high housing costs are an input into everything that you buy.
So what needs to happen? We need to stop treating housing as a speculative asset. It's simply stealing from the next generation. Worse, it's diverting investment capital from productive output because land has become the asset with the best tax treatment, highest returns and most government protections. So what does this look like?
1. Some form of land value tax. The higher the value goes, the higher the taxes go. You raise the rent and your land value taxes go up because it's more valuable;
2. Punitively tax land hoarding including second homes. We could give discounted rates to primary residences of state residents. Nobody else should get a discount. This would mean repealing Prop 13 and that's never going to happen. As an example of this, I'll bring up Prop 19. In CA you can inherit a preferential property tax rate. Prop 19 proposed to limit this to only one property could inherit this preferential rate and it barely passed (51% IIRC). Do we think that 49% of California voters have multiple properties that have property tax rates set 40+ years ago? Of course they don't. It's an example of how people vote against their own interests;
3. Part of what sold Prop 13 originally was the idea of pushing seniors out of their homes with property taxes. Well, that gave Disneyland a tax rate that was set in the 1960s. California should do what Texas does: you can defer your property taxes until you die if you're a senior but there's no capped property tax rates like incumbent SF residents have and no inherited preferential property tax rates;
4. Wind back the preferential collateralization of property for mortgage debt over time. Residential property lending now dominates bank lending and earnings. It's significantly harder to get finance for any form of productive output;
5. Wind back over time preferential tax treatment for home ownership.
Do I think any of this will happen? No.
Oh, one of the worst things to do is transaction taxes, often called stamp duty. This is where you pay a percentage of the value on purchase. This really hurts mobility. I guess it's fine if it's only on the luxury end of the market (CA's is at $5M+?) but it's not a good idea regardless.
The other part of this is to provide social housing like Vienna. The government should be a significant supplier of affordable quality housing.
I think the idea is that if the market demand is such that it allows them to raise rents, they'd already have done it, whether or not expenses justify it.
Yeah, that's unlikely. There are certain classes of renters it can't be passed on to during their rental term, but I'm guessing it can and likely would in general.
People can also sell their land/homes and move. It's less liquid than other assets, but less doesn't mean people won't sell/leave.
In Massachusetts it’s legal to pass on real property tax increases during the term of a residential lease, provided the lease contains specific clauses. (Most leases do, as a result.) And most commercial leases are triple-net, meaning the tenant is also on the hook for increases.
I would be surprised if most land consumption taxes (whether structured as property or land) would not get directly passed through to the beneficial consumers of that land quite quickly, or for their privilege to consume that land to be terminated/non-renewed at the expiration.
I'm California some percentage of certain developments need to be rental controlled, so those are exempt from increases for those lower income folks, but I'm sure the difference would be spread out among everyone who isn't rent controlled.
I hope we agree that we need more taxes, it doesn't matter if they are taxes on billionaires, taxes on property, taxes on sales, taxes on crypto, or taxes on the poor. Without taxes we can't have a civilized society.
The number of different taxes is constantly increasing, obfuscating the total tax burden, and making democratic accountability almost impossible. Additionally, tax collections are already at a historical high, while government deficits world-wide are also at record levels, with services on the decline, and no realistic prospect of balancing budgets. This is true for most western countries.
Given the current situation, I do not agree that "we need more taxes", but would welcome your clarifying exactly what you mean.
For a long time I agreed with you, but seeing how the tax money is spent I cannot agree any longer. In most cases government is no longer even spending the money itself, instead it is giving the money to NGOs.
I would much rather see people keep more of their dollars and use them to 'vote' for the products and services that benefit them most, via their purchases.
I think we should start with changing taxes on corporations/companies, specifically being able to indefinitely write off expenses against income regardless of size/etc...
Most companies take profit eventually, but if it's possible for a company to decide to never take profit and grow/acquire perpetually without paying any taxes on gross income, that's a problem.
That'd be like individuals being able to deduct living expenses and having uncapped pre-tax 401k contributions.
The ratio of the economy that gets collected as taxes has only gone up over time. Do you have an idea for how much should be collected as some ideal ratio? At what point do the effects of taxation become counterproductive?
Taxes aren’t 0 right now, nor particularly close for anyone being taxed. Your statement supports taxes as a concept at all, but what’s the specific argument that they must be more than they are today?
Wealth taxes are a symptom of a broken tax system. If you let someone get to hundreds of billions in net worth and then realize they haven’t been appropriately paying back into the system, it’s already too late. Like the article says they can simply say “no” in a variety of ways, from fighting in court to simply leaving.
> If you let someone get to hundreds of billions in net worth and then realize they haven’t been appropriately paying back into the system
This is to once again mistake net worth for money. Net worth is not real. It is not a good measure of the money someone may be able to realise. They do not have hundreds of billions. There is nothing to tax until they sell some shares.
I dont know why it's so complicated to just say "Money is Money when it's Liquid, tax it then". Any loans on wealth should be taxed..nationwide.
But even in California's case this doesn't feel like anything anybody would object to. Given how much California Billionaires liquidate using loans on their wealth, I bet, they could do a middle class tax cut too to offset it a little bit too.
I am little baffled as to why the politicos haven't latched on to this whole-heartedly. You can still proudly say you're taxing Billionaire wealth. Because you are! Just more sensibly.
> Net worth is not real.
Good way to find out it this is the case: take it away. Not real, right? Why would they mind?
Larry Page owns about 5% of Alphabet, which is worth $4T, so he has $200B give or take. Which part of that do you think reflects a "broken tax system"? Companies should get kneecapped if their market cap gets too high? Founders shouldn't be allowed to keep even a single digit percent of the company?
The broken part is that there is third world-level poverty on the streets outside Google’s offices, working class people cannot afford to live in the Bay Area, and a fifth of California lives in poverty.
Yes. No one person should have assets worth as much as the GDP of Qatar.
This fundamentally misunderstands how this paper wealth actually works.
If the $100B+ was created through ownership of a company and is unrealized wealth, how would you have taxed it if not through a wealth tax? Nobody is getting to $100B by way of income.
If you let someone get to hundreds of billions in net worth and then realize they haven’t been appropriately paying back into the system, it’s already too late. Like the article says they can simply say “no” in a variety of ways, from fighting in court to simply leaving.
It's only too late if you're timid and wimpy.
And care about the rule of law. You cannot pass retroactive laws, you cannot pass laws that target individual people. If you pass a general law (which could very well have reasonable objections), people have to have a chance to leave.
"I'm passing this law that is effective the exact millisecond I sign it, tough shit if you don't like it" is tyranny and despotism. But based on your comment I think you know that.
> And care about the rule of law. You cannot pass retroactive laws, you cannot pass laws that target individual people. If you pass a general law...
A wealth tax is not a retroactive law, nor something that targets an individual person. It's a "general law" in your parlance. Think about it.
> If you pass a general law (which could very well have reasonable objections), people have to have a chance to leave.
I don't think so. By what legal authority is that required?
the FTB is anything but timid and wimpy
if the voters and legislature have the “bravery” to pass the wealth tax law, it will be aggressively enforced by the FTB
the second-order effects, whatever they may be, would be clearly visible within a couple years.
Or if people can easily move. Or if you want the next generation of startups to operate in your state.
Just a moronic comment lol
Man discovers prop 13. News at 9.
And it will never be repealed.
Old voters like the house they brought 20 years ago for 100k being worth 1.5 million today. They also like not paying taxes on that 1.4m in wealth accumulation.
Is it not that the gains are unrealized? If they sold the house they would pay capital gains tax?
Property taxes are unrelated to income tax
I think not wanting to pay some yearly tax on that $1.4 million because the government pretends that the same as having $1.4M cash in the bank, or making $1.4M in a year, is fine.
Not wanting to pay the property taxes associated with a $1.5M home is the problem.
Which is why we also have things like a deferred property tax program! The way to "solve" the problems Prop 13 addresses would be to expand programs like that, but homeowners—disproportionately active middle- and upper-middle-class voters—want to have their cake and eat it too.
I mean, I do too. Mine just happens to have been bought before the last inflationary cycle.
But neglects to consider why it won a majority of votes. Why did it? And how does Prop 13 relate to the more recent Prop 19, which substantially weakened it?
> News at 9.
The idiom is "film at 11."
I agree the proposed wealth tax is a bad idea, but raising property taxes is probably not viable. They are incredibly unfavorable to voters. No one who owns a home wants to pay rent, that's why you buy in the first place.
Personally, this is why I am fine with higher income or sales taxes.
If the tax is calculated based on residency at the time it was earned or granted rather than when it vested or was sold then it doesn’t matter if they leave.
It's the single taxers again, with a new argument.
I think the point of the article is correct; the issue with CA is everyone wants to live there, including rich people. If we try and tax them then they'll leave just long enough to not pay state income tax, if we tax property values then the state actually gets the tax and doesn't miss out on job creation or future revenue.
Red states have implemented low income tax with heavy property taxes (think Texas) with great results. and although I'm sure California would just manage to mess it up it's a great idea.
I would not frame Texas as having great results. If anything places should get as little like Texas as they possibly can. I mean they send you to jail for an abortion or a gram of weed. It's living under Shari-yall law.
The tax system in Texas is a better system. Sure, Texas has lots of problems. That doesn't mean there is nothing to learn from Texas.
I live in Texas. I don't like the restrictive laws. Texas could learn a lot for California, just not in the areas of taxation
The lack of a progressive income tax structure gives texas few levers to ameliorate budget issues without cutting services or raising property taxes. It doesn't help the current governor seems to be pushing city budgets to the brink by also cutting off the property tax lever.
https://www.texastribune.org/2026/08/17/texas-city-budgets-c...
Out of curiosity, why couldn't property taxes be progressive? What stops Texas from having different tax rates based on the value of the property?
It even seems like it avoids a lot the pit falls the uber-wealthy use to avoid most progressive income taxes. Its easy to disguise income as something else. Property, though, is right out in the open. The state can easily audit and value property and send the bill. No matter how fancy the accounting, that bill will eventually reach the person "consuming" that property.
Nothing I'm aware of stops that.
In practice, at least from what I've read, in TX, the largest/wealthiest companies get the biggest/best tax breaks (eg Tesla), and end up paying proportionally less, so it's somewhat regressive.
Better, or better for you in particular?
> Shari-yall
Made me laugh while drinking; messy, but worth it for the smiles I'll have every time I remember it! Outstanding job, internet stranger.
It’s pretty easy not to murder babies.
Two things:
1. If wealth was only motivated by taxes and was going to leave, it would've left already. Fact is, billionaires don't want to live in Tennessee;
2. Nobody is doing the right thing to tackle any of this, including California.
The article mentions California has land and that's the key point. Unfortunately, California homeowners have been coopted into voting against their own interests to raise property values. If the house you bought in SF in 1975 for $80,000 is now worth $3M, you still only own 1 housing unit's worth of wealth. And that housing cost is an input into everything you need to buy because all the workers required for those things have to be paid high enough to pay those exorbitant rents.
Let me repeat that: high housing costs are an input into everything that you buy.
So what needs to happen? We need to stop treating housing as a speculative asset. It's simply stealing from the next generation. Worse, it's diverting investment capital from productive output because land has become the asset with the best tax treatment, highest returns and most government protections. So what does this look like?
1. Some form of land value tax. The higher the value goes, the higher the taxes go. You raise the rent and your land value taxes go up because it's more valuable;
2. Punitively tax land hoarding including second homes. We could give discounted rates to primary residences of state residents. Nobody else should get a discount. This would mean repealing Prop 13 and that's never going to happen. As an example of this, I'll bring up Prop 19. In CA you can inherit a preferential property tax rate. Prop 19 proposed to limit this to only one property could inherit this preferential rate and it barely passed (51% IIRC). Do we think that 49% of California voters have multiple properties that have property tax rates set 40+ years ago? Of course they don't. It's an example of how people vote against their own interests;
3. Part of what sold Prop 13 originally was the idea of pushing seniors out of their homes with property taxes. Well, that gave Disneyland a tax rate that was set in the 1960s. California should do what Texas does: you can defer your property taxes until you die if you're a senior but there's no capped property tax rates like incumbent SF residents have and no inherited preferential property tax rates;
4. Wind back the preferential collateralization of property for mortgage debt over time. Residential property lending now dominates bank lending and earnings. It's significantly harder to get finance for any form of productive output;
5. Wind back over time preferential tax treatment for home ownership.
Do I think any of this will happen? No.
Oh, one of the worst things to do is transaction taxes, often called stamp duty. This is where you pay a percentage of the value on purchase. This really hurts mobility. I guess it's fine if it's only on the luxury end of the market (CA's is at $5M+?) but it's not a good idea regardless.
The other part of this is to provide social housing like Vienna. The government should be a significant supplier of affordable quality housing.
>. The land value tax can’t be dodged by leaving nor can it be passed on to renters
ROFL what? I'd bet the author a lot of money that costs WILL roll downhill, the source matters not.
I think the idea is that if the market demand is such that it allows them to raise rents, they'd already have done it, whether or not expenses justify it.
If they can't raise rents to cover expenses plus "enough profit to make this PITA worth it" then things (slowly over time) grind to a halt.
Yeah, that's unlikely. There are certain classes of renters it can't be passed on to during their rental term, but I'm guessing it can and likely would in general.
People can also sell their land/homes and move. It's less liquid than other assets, but less doesn't mean people won't sell/leave.
In Massachusetts it’s legal to pass on real property tax increases during the term of a residential lease, provided the lease contains specific clauses. (Most leases do, as a result.) And most commercial leases are triple-net, meaning the tenant is also on the hook for increases.
I would be surprised if most land consumption taxes (whether structured as property or land) would not get directly passed through to the beneficial consumers of that land quite quickly, or for their privilege to consume that land to be terminated/non-renewed at the expiration.
I'm California some percentage of certain developments need to be rental controlled, so those are exempt from increases for those lower income folks, but I'm sure the difference would be spread out among everyone who isn't rent controlled.
I'm curious what costs you think will roll downhill and why
I ctrl+f search for "gentrification" and nothing pops up. I close the Substack blog and proceed with my day.
why is that?
I hope we agree that we need more taxes, it doesn't matter if they are taxes on billionaires, taxes on property, taxes on sales, taxes on crypto, or taxes on the poor. Without taxes we can't have a civilized society.
The number of different taxes is constantly increasing, obfuscating the total tax burden, and making democratic accountability almost impossible. Additionally, tax collections are already at a historical high, while government deficits world-wide are also at record levels, with services on the decline, and no realistic prospect of balancing budgets. This is true for most western countries.
Given the current situation, I do not agree that "we need more taxes", but would welcome your clarifying exactly what you mean.
For a long time I agreed with you, but seeing how the tax money is spent I cannot agree any longer. In most cases government is no longer even spending the money itself, instead it is giving the money to NGOs.
I would much rather see people keep more of their dollars and use them to 'vote' for the products and services that benefit them most, via their purchases.
Congragulations you have just rediscovered conservatism.
I think we should start with changing taxes on corporations/companies, specifically being able to indefinitely write off expenses against income regardless of size/etc...
Most companies take profit eventually, but if it's possible for a company to decide to never take profit and grow/acquire perpetually without paying any taxes on gross income, that's a problem.
That'd be like individuals being able to deduct living expenses and having uncapped pre-tax 401k contributions.
No thanks, I too much in taxes as it is. California has a spending problem, not a revenue problem.
Spending problem? What spending problem?
https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/news/california-high-speed-r...
The ratio of the economy that gets collected as taxes has only gone up over time. Do you have an idea for how much should be collected as some ideal ratio? At what point do the effects of taxation become counterproductive?
Taxes aren’t 0 right now, nor particularly close for anyone being taxed. Your statement supports taxes as a concept at all, but what’s the specific argument that they must be more than they are today?
this is the sadest assertion i've ever seen. if sucking the life out of people is the only way people can remain civilized then we are truely lost.
How else are we going to support public infrastructure and society?