I don’t really understand why tax avoidance is the holy grail of the richest American families.
When you’ve got more than enough money to fund your lavish lifestyle, your family foundation or, say, send your wife on a girls’ trip to outer space, why not just happily pay your taxes?
But that’s me being naive.
In this country, I guess, the point of getting rich is to get even richer.
As convicted tax evader and New York real estate mogul Leona Helmsley once so infamously put it: “We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.”
Years later, Helmsley’s real estate rival Donald Trump channeled the very same sentiment: During a 2016 presidential debate, Trump’s Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton accused the Republican nominee of not paying federal taxes. His response? “That makes me smart.”
I’m so over this attitude.
I’m tired of the in-your-face conspicuous consumption of couples like Jeff and Lauren Bezos. I’m sickened by the grotesque displays of brummagem in the Oval Office, and of the greedy urge to pay for lower taxes on the rich by kicking low-income Americans off Medicaid and choking off their healthcare subsidies. (And don’t get me started on the cost of the ill-conceived war on Iran, which we learned this week is topping $25 billion. So far.)
If we’ve learned anything about Republican tax-cutting mania over the past few decades, it’s that George H.W. Bush was absolutely correct when he described Ronald Reagan’s “trickle down” theory as “voodoo economics.” Other critics have aptly dubbed it “supply side snake oil.”
Repeat after me: Tax cuts do not pay for themselves.
Like a lot of left-leaning voters, when I first read about California’s proposed 2026 Billionaire Tax Act I was tickled.
Why not? The billionaire families it would affect are benefiting hugely from Trump’s “big, beautiful” tax cuts. Why not force them to give back a little so people can have healthcare?
The initiative, which appears to have gathered enough signatures to qualify for California’s November ballot, was crafted by the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West to help cover the roughly $30 billion the state stands to lose from Trump’s tax-and-spending law. It’s estimated that over five years, the one-time levy would generate about $100 billion, mostly for the state’s faltering healthcare system.
There are obvious drawbacks. For one thing, you can’t impose state taxes on people who don’t live in the state, and over the years, California budgets have come to rely too heavily on the income and capital gains taxes paid by the wealthy, which can fluctuate dramatically.
According to numerous news reports, about a half-dozen of California’s 200-plus billionaires have left the state to avoid paying the proposed tax. They have purchased lavish estates in Nevada, Florida and Texas. And though they are tiny in number, they are so wealthy that they would have paid about $27 billion, slightly more than a quarter of the total predicted from the new tax, should it pass.
The chintzy billionaires who have reportedly fled because of the potential tax include Google co-founders Sergey Brin (estimated net worth: $219 billion) and Larry Page ($300 billion), Paypal and Palantir Technologies co-founder Peter Thiel ($27.5 billion), Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg ($200 billion) and Oracle’s Larry Ellison ($225 billion). To be fair, they all have philanthropic foundations and have donated huge sums to their pet charities and research projects.
And yet, it’s really a shame they don’t follow the lead of Nvidia’s Jensen Huang ($150 billion), who recently urged tech CEOs to stay. “I say to everybody, ‘Move to California, don’t leave.’ It’s the highest taxes in the world, but it’s OK.”
In January, Huang told Bloomberg that he was “perfectly fine” with the proposed tax on billionaires. “I haven’t thought about it even once,” he said. “We work in Silicon Valley because that’s where the talent pool is. … We chose to live in Silicon Valley, and whatever taxes they would like to apply, so be it.”
It is true that wealth taxes, while very appealing to those of us who do not own private islands, private jets and yachts, are difficult to administer. And countries that have tried them out have often backpedaled on the policies. But unlike places like France, which imposed a wealth tax and later repealed it, this is a one-time deal.
And let’s not forget that in the last few political cycles, tech billionaires have come out of their Silicon Valley garages and become deeply interested in politics, moving ever rightward as they cozy up to the Trump administration.
And they certainly aren’t stupid. California has a long tradition of competing ballot initiatives, and in that spirit, some of the obscenely rich guys — primarily Brin — are pushing two initiatives, which would either make the billionaire tax illegal or impossible to enforce. Both, under the aegis of the political action committee Building a Better California, appear to be on track to qualify for the November ballot.
One can only wonder: a better California for whom?
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