The Patriot Post® · Losing the Rich Doesn't Bother the Left

There has always been a segment of Americans who believe rich people didn’t earn what they’ve acquired. Instead, they reckon that those gains were ill-gotten, whether through amazing luck, stepping on people all the way up the corporate ladder, or exploiting the working poor — or, for good measure, all three. But that last option seems to be the resting place for many a Democrat who has tried to sell a steeply progressive tax program that will “soak the rich” and give them what they deserve, that “fair share” of handing over wealth to the government for handy redistribution to those they deem worthy, or whose votes are easiest to buy.

Among that segment of Americans who want to stick it to the fat cat are the thousands who have signed the petitions for what is being called the “billionaire’s tax,” enabling it to have a place on the California ballot this fall. Proponents of the tax, which include the state’s powerful SEIU union, say it’s a way for the wealthy to give back. “We’re calling on California’s billionaires to step up and pay a one-time, emergency 5% tax to prevent the collapse of California healthcare and help fund California public K-14 education and state food assistance programs,” says the union, claiming it would take from the pool of $2 trillion supposedly in the possession of the 200 billionaires affected.

The problem California is having — and the primary reason even Governor Gavin Newsom is against the proposal — is that it’s creating additional capital flight from a state that people were already leaving in droves. And when you’ve lost even The Washington Post, you may want to rethink your strategy.

As the Post’s editorial board wistfully notes, “This emigration will cost California’s state government somewhere between $3.5 billion and $4.5 billion every year in other tax collections, and up to $19 billion in lost GDP, according to new estimates from Jared Walczak, a visiting fellow at the California Tax Foundation.”

Yet there are others who fail to learn their lesson, perhaps because their ivory-tower upbringing shielded them from reality. We know a lot about New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, but Seattle also recently elected a far-left redistributionist named Katie Wilson. As editorialist Samuel J. Abrams points out in The Wall Street Journal, “Both mayors are intelligent. Both are well-versed in the moral vocabulary of the institutions that produced them. Both now govern cities full of people who live inside the exact constraints — rent, payroll, trade-offs, consequences — from which they have been spared. The heart of the problem isn’t that they’re unqualified. It’s that they’re unacquainted.” Abrams calls it “the monoculture that produced them,” as both are children of academics who have spent their lives living on the backs of those who sent their children to their respective educational institutions, often putting those kids deep into a financial hole of their own.

Mayor Wilson gained recognition for her dismissive remark at a recent Seattle University forum about a similar millionaire tax proposal that the state of Washington passed, making Seattle’s tax burden the steepest such local burden for high-income earners in the country. “I think the claims that millionaires are going to leave our state are, like, super overblown,” said Wilson dismissively. “And if — the ones that leave, like, bye.”

That isn’t exactly an “Open for Business” sign.

“We can deduce from her dismissal of the ‘overblown’ notion that capital is mobile that Wilson does not welcome a potential exodus of her city’s tax base,” noted National Review’s Noah Rothman. “That rote concession elicited no emotion from either the mayor or her audience. But when Wilson displayed her contempt for the paltry few wealthy Seattle residents who would, of course, leave, the audience reveled in her self-satisfaction and, seemingly, experienced some of their own.”

It’s not just her, either. “Wilson’s sentiment does seem to be common on the left,” added Jarrett Stepman at The Daily Signal. “They create policies that drive people away, declare some kind of victory that their enemies are leaving, then, at some point, desperately try to get them to come back. Somehow, their ideas always lead to a Berlin Wall to keep people in rather than out.” To that point, Stepman cites the example of New York Governor Kathy Hochul, who went from famously telling her critics to “get out of here, we don’t need you” to begging the wealthy to come back and take one for the Empire State team by paying high taxes to help the state out. It doesn’t work that way.

Perhaps a better approach — and the one that low-tax states like Texas, Tennessee, and Florida seem to be adopting — is to embrace the billionaire as a creator of value and jobs. “Billionaires rock,” opines Kyle Smith in The Wall Street Journal. (Admittedly, that plays to the Journal’s audience, doesn’t it?) “They’re great even when you don’t calculate what they contribute to the public weal, which is a lot. Add up the tax and the philanthropy, and the citizenry gets 59% of what billionaires earn, or 73% if you follow their fortunes into death. Estimates that billionaires pay lower tax rates than everyone else rest on distortions, tricks, and lies. Merely living amid billionaires has pretty dazzling effects when you’re in a place like New York or Los Angeles, where plutocratic munificence builds beautiful things such as museums and performing-arts centers.”

Smith continues, “It’s a quirk of American political thought that we revere rich athletes and entertainers, whose talents are on very public display and can hardly be dismissed. Yet when it comes to billionaires, whose skills are often exercised in invisible ways, many of us grow beady-eyed and wary.” With wealth taxes and fights over inheritance making it hard to pass down a fortune, most of our modern-day billionaires are first-generation entrepreneurs who actually worked hard to earn it by creating companies that grew to be conglomerates — think Elon Musk’s Tesla and SpaceX, Jeff Bezos’s Amazon, Bill Gates’s Microsoft, Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook/Meta, and so on and so forth. You may not agree with their political views, but you have to admire how they built their fortunes.

When it comes to the Left and taxes, revenue isn’t the point; otherwise, they’d implement tax policies that generate the most revenue. The punishment and the “fairness” are the point because communism is based on envy. They hate anyone who has “too much,” and they feel guilty if they’re among them. That’s why they basically say “Don’t let the door hit you” when billionaires leave.

It’s the smart cities and states that open the door and say to the makers of society, “Come on in. You’re more than welcome here.”