Tag Archives: billionaires tax

Voting With Your Feet

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On Saturday, The New York Post posted an article about Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick. He has announced that he is leaving California for Texas.

Our Founding Fathers envisioned a nation where each state would be an individual laboratory to find the best ways to do things–provide services, create budgets, levy taxes, etc. The idea was that the unsuccessful states would learn from the successful states. Unfortunately, some of our less successful states seem to have a very slow learning curve and rather than learn from what is successful are doubling down on what doesn’t work. California, a beautiful state with beautiful beaches, and beautiful weather is one example of that slow learning curve. The state’s tax plans are driving successful people out of the state.

The article reports:

Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick says he has traded California for Texas, joining a growing list of billionaires abandoning the state as lefty lawmakers push for a one-off tax on their wealth.

Appearing on TPBN to discuss his robotics startup Atoms, Kalanick told hosts John Coogan and Jordi Hays he relocated to Austin at the end of 2025.

“Just to be clear, on December 18, I moved to Texas. I don’t know what’s so specific about December 18, but let’s just say it’s prior to January,” said Kalanick, pointedly.

That means the 49-year-old’s estimated $3.6 billion fortune will not be subjected to the tax should it be introduced.

Kalanick joked he felt a twinge of FOMO when he hears about other wealthy Americans relocating to Florida.

“Why so much Florida action?! Like, come on homies,” he said.

Those ”homies” would be billionaire tech figures to leave California for Florida., including Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, PayPal and Palantir investor Peter Thiel, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg.

The article notes:

While California still boasts the largest billionaire population in the United States, an increasing number have relocated to places such as Reno, Austin and Miami.

As long as people are free to move around the country, they will gravitate to the states with lower taxes and a lower cost of living. Businesses and corporations will also move to states with a better business climate. Note that Cape Cod Potato Chips are being moved out of Massachusetts.

An Interesting Place To Draw The Line

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On March 6th, Issues & Insights posted an article about Bernie Sanders’ new tax idea–tax the billionaires–they shouldn’t even exist. Okay, billionaires have a lot of money, much of it made in the technology field, but Bernie Sanders has a lot of money too, all of it made while he was a public servant.

The article notes:

There are not quite 1,000 billionaires in the U.S. Roughly 200 of them are still in California, even after the departures of PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, and others who don’t wish to have their earned wealth seized by greedy hands and redistributed politically. It would take a while to drive them all to extinction, but it’s obvious that Sanders and the others who play the politics of envy would sadistically enjoy a painfully drawn-out eradication.

Naturally, they stake out a position based on morality, but if they get their way, they will do deep harm to the country. An advanced economy that has no billionaires is an economy that is in decline. Any economy that loses even a portion of its billionaires will suffer similarly.

Billionaires aren’t caricatures in board games. They are indispensable to prosperity, not just their own but that of all of us. They create wealth, generate jobs, add trillions in value to society, develop lifesaving innovations, efficiently allocate capital, fund charities and philanthropic causes, take risks few others would dare to, and send an immense amount of dollars to the U.S. Treasury (the top 1% of taxpayers were responsible for 40% of federal revenues).

And what has Sanders done? He’s built nothing and lives to tear down what others have produced. He stirs up resentment, rails against choice, has been trying to slay the oligarch dragons for more than three decades, and wants to force the country to join a commune that he designs and runs.

Maybe we were wrong. A single billionaire isn’t more valuable than a thousand Bernie Sanders. A single billionaire is more valuable than a million Bernie Sanders.

Just for laughs, let’s talk about Bernie Sanders’ wealth.

According to Gazette Direct:

Between 2009 and 2018, Sanders and his wife, Jane, reported a combined income of $4.7 million, largely fueled by his writing. His other books, such as The Speech: A Historic Filibuster on Corporate Greed and Where We Go from Here, added to his finances, with royalties ranging from $170,000 to $850,000 in peak years.

Real estate is another pillar of Sanders’ wealth. He and Jane own three properties. Their primary home is a four-bedroom house in Chittenden County, Vermont, purchased in 2009 for $405,000, now valued at around $440,000. They also own a townhouse in Washington, D.C., bought in 2007 for $488,999, which has appreciated to an estimated $685,000. Their vacation home, a lakeside cabin in Vermont, was acquired in 2016 for $575,000, a steal compared to its original listing price of $775,000. These properties, though mortgaged, contribute significantly to his assets.

Notice that Bernie Sanders is going after billionaires–not millionaires (because he is one). Somehow socialists always want other peoples’ money while keeping their own.

A Really Bad Tax Proposal

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Whenever the Democrats want to raise our taxes, they always cry that the rich do not pay their fair share. That claim is totally contradicted by the actual facts, but that has never stopped them. On Sunday, Hot Air posted an article about their latest scheme to ‘tax the rich.’

The article comments on the Biden administration’s plans for a ‘billionaires tax’:

This isn’t technically a “billionaire’s tax” because it hits anyone making more than $100 million. That’s a staggering amount of money for most of us, but not everyone who brings in $100 million actually has a billion dollars in wealth laying around. That’s sort of a nitpick, I admit, but it’s worth pointing out.

Just as a reminder, under the current system, the top ten percent of earners in the United States (those making more than $151K per year) pay more than 70% of the taxes collected by the government. The top one percent (making more than $546K) pay nearly 40% by themselves. The idea that high earners aren’t “paying their fair share” is simply a display of intentional ignorance.

Another detail of the proposed tax hike should also run into opposition and a likely court challenge. The description of the amount of “income” to be taxed includes the phrase “unrealized investment income.” In other words, if the shares comprising your retirement plan or your stock portfolio go up by a given percentage, that increase will be treated as income and you’ll be taxed on it even though you haven’t cashed it in yet.

So why should I leave money in the stock market if I have to pay taxes on it whether I cash it out or not? Why should I invest in a home if it is going to cost me money each year in addition to the real estate taxes and expense of owning a home? What is that going to do to the stock market and the real estate market?

The article concludes:

Here’s another thing to remember about those people with incomes at those levels. They don’t just pay a lot of taxes. They also tend to be max donors to political campaigns and to PACs as well, including to Democrats. I imagine they will all be watching closely to see how each member of Congress plans to vote on this and those planning to vote for it probably shouldn’t expect those donors to be whipping out their pens and checkbooks for them in the midterm races.

Manchin and Sinema have already come out against any big tax hikes while the nation is reeling under the current Bidenflation levels. It would be stunning if you could find a single Republican to vote for it. This sort of “eat the rich” tax proposal is the stuff of dreams on the left, intended to make the Democratic Socialists sequel with delight. But it’s not a serious proposal and you probably shouldn’t start getting your hopes of seeing it pass into law too far up just yet.

I hope the author of the article is right. The Democrats may get desperate to do something as they watch to polling about the approaching mid-terms.