California's "billionaire tax" is the wrong approach

Treść źródłowa

If I were a conservative, I’d argue against California’s proposed one-time 5% “billionaire tax” on the grounds that it would reduce the incentive for billionaires to invest and create jobs. I’d argue that in order to guard and support the engines of our prosperity, we have to keep taxes low, etc. etc.But I am not a conservative. I actually support taxing rich people more, and I support taxing the super-rich at higher rates. Tax progressivity is good; there’s no reason America’s income tax brackets should stop increasing after $600,000. Capital availability isn’t a problem in America (as evidenced by the data center boom), and raising taxes on the super-rich isn’t going to make Elon Musk give up his American citizenship and move to Singapore. The moral case against high taxation of top incomes is weak; the United States government and social system is what made it possible for American billionaires to make their money, and they ought to give a lot back to support that system.But California’s proposed plan — a one-time confiscation of 5% of the total net worth of everyone who has net worth of over $1 billion — is a silly way to go about doing this, for three reasons:A one-time tax is bad, because it can’t provide consistent funding for anything, and because it just creates uncertainty about future taxes.A state-level tax on the ultra-rich is not a very efficient way of raising revenue, since the rich can just move out of state. In general, this tax idea fits into the increasing trend toward “slopulism” in Democratic policymaking — the idea that a modern government can be fund…