The California Gold Rush of the mid-1850s attracted everyone from Levi Strauss to Leland Stanford, all of them eager to work hard and strike it rich in a land of seemingly unlimited opportunity.

It’s amazing what 170 years have done to the Golden State.

These days, Californians are engaged in something of a reverse gold rush. They’re heading for the exits, eager to leave their increasingly odd and oppressive state. Unfortunately for them, the state’s Democrat legislators aren’t inclined to let them go unscathed. Recently, California Democrats introduced AB 259, a bill that would tax the state’s residents who have a “worldwide net worth” above $1 billion, even those who’ve left the state.

“With this modest tax on the ultra-wealthy who pay a lower effective tax rate than the bottom 99%,” said Assemblyman Alex Lee, who introduced the bill, “we would have sustained investments in our schools, tackle homelessness, maintain and expand needed services, and much more.”

The bill would affix an extra 1.5% annual tax on those with a net worth above $1 billion, or $500 million for married residents filing separately, as early as January 2024. Those with a net worth above $50 million would be hit with an extra 1% tax as early as 2026.

It’s a “modest tax,” Lee insists. But it’s yet another tax, and California’s taxes are already among the highest in the land. For example, a 1% “millionaire’s tax” is already in place for incomes of $1 million or more. And in 2021, the state’s sales tax, 7.25%, was the highest in the nation.

Mark Twain must’ve been thinking about someone like Lee when he quipped, “The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin.”

Lee, though, not only wants to tax the rich, he wants to scapegoat them: “We’ve been losing our lower and middle-income residents,” he said, “that are being priced out of this state because they can’t afford the high cost of living while shouldering the burden of paying for our roads, infrastructure, and schools all the while the ultra-wealthy doubled their fortunes during the pandemic.”

Nothing like a little noxious class warfare to help chase away the state’s most productive and innovative citizens.

Lee does have a point, but it ultimately comes back on him and his fellow Democrats. No one who’s surveyed California’s cost of living and its real estate market can dispute that regular folks are being priced out of the state — especially from its deep-blue enclaves all along the coast. But whose fault is that? It’s not as if California Democrats don’t enjoy almost total control of the state’s governance, including bullet-proof supermajorities in both the state’s assembly and its senate. Sadly, not even California’s constitution, which sets a high bar for budget-related legislation, can protect the state’s residents from the consequences of their electoral decisions.

What kind of knucklehead governs this twisted state, anyway?

Lee’s legislation, as Fox News reports, is actually “a modified version of a wealth tax approved in the California Assembly in 2020, which the Democrat-led state Senate declined to pass.” So cooler heads might well prevail once again when this bill comes up for a vote. But get this: “The current version just introduced includes measures to allow California to impose wealth taxes on residents even years after they left the state and moved elsewhere.”

Cali Democrats are thus like that angry ex who just can’t let you go; the one who just can’t quit you, babe.

Keeping with the classic rock motif, political analyst Robert Spencer likens all this to the Eagles classic “Hotel California”: You can check out anytime you want, but you can never leave.

“That wasn’t just some nightmare scenario of the coked-out beautiful people in Malibu,” Spencer writes, “it was a foretaste of a new proposal from California’s Marxist party, a.k.a. the Democrats. You can hate California’s nanny-state socialism, high taxes, rampant homelessness, and ever-rising crime, but if you’ve ever lived there, you could be subsidizing it all for the rest of your life. Yes, even if you escape.”

No wonder folks are rushing out of California.

California exodus visualized by State pic.twitter.com/FiybeHVZrC

— Terrance (@thisisterrance) February 23, 2022