A Los Angeles Times columnist is getting ridiculed online for trying to guilt Californians into maintaining their residence despite a new tax proposal by Democrats.
The main proponent of the new tax on high-earners is the SEIU, which says the tax is needed to help fund more social programs. But some wealthy Californians have indicated that they would simply move out of the state and take their tax revenue with them.
‘The nerve of the goon who wrote this slop.’
According to news and culture critic Lorraine Ali, those wealthy Californians owe their success to the state.
“California helped make them among the richest people in the world. Now they’re fleeing because California wants a little something back,” she wrote for the Times.
Ali argues that the new tax is necessary to offset the losses to the state treasury from the tax relief signed into law by President Donald Trump.
Arguments aside, it’s disturbing to think that some of the richest people in the nation would rather pick up and move than put a small fraction of their vast California-made — or in the case of the burger chain, inherited — fortunes toward helping others who need a financial boost.
The article was excoriated by many who found the argument disturbingly statist in nature.
“California didn’t make them rich — their ideas and hard work made them rich. California limited them — they could have done more,” U.S. special envoy Richard Grenell responded. “[Lorraine Ali] is a TV critic and wacky left wing activist. She doesn’t know finance or math.”
“I want to thank the @latimes,” Duke economist Michael Munger replied. “People often ask for examples, believing that the MSM cannot be as asinine as I claim. This is very helpful. Unbelievably dumb, but helpful.”
“The nerve of the goon who wrote this slop,” comedian Kirk Wilcox responded. “California already has a progressive income tax system, meaning that the rich pay higher rates. And the writer talks as if they don’t pay anything!”
“This is one of the most predictable disasters in recent memory,” Billy Binion of Reason replied. “Wealth taxes never work. People just … move their money elsewhere. These people made the state rich — not the other way around. Economically-illiterate nonsense.”
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“If California can just magically make an arbitrary person rich, why doesn’t it just make some other people rich and fleece them instead?” another critic suggested.
Although the tax proposal is backed by the service industry union, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom vehemently opposes the policy on the basis that it would be damaging to the state to have high-earners leave.
“The evidence is in. The impacts are very real — not just substantive economic impacts in terms of the revenue, but start-ups, the indirect impacts,” he said about the tax. “I think it will be defeated, because I think people understand what it does versus what it promotes to do.”
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Los angeles times writer, Billionaire tax in california, Wealthy leaving california, California taxes, Politics
