It's impossible to overstate how terrible an idea this is. Moving out of state is a cake walk. You can even wave to your friends from the other side of Lake Tahoe. California is sincerely begging to implode its entire tax base at the outset of a looming budget crisis.
Clarification: my concern here has nothing to do with whether high taxes are ethical or good/bad for society. It's that:
1) moving within the country has always been trivially easy for wealthy people
2) California's COVID response forcibly decoupled work from physical location
Whatever you think of a federal wealth tax, the debate has always meaningfully hinged on whether it causes capital flight. The people who would pay the bulk of this tax already have secondary residences in their favorite places, and they've been working remotely for months now.
California has a very challenging needle to thread with its massive anticipated budget shortfalls and already exceptionally high state taxes. I see massive federal bailouts in the future.
An exercise for the reader: look at this list of the wealthiest Californians, calculate their annual obligations under a 0.4% wealth tax, and think about how many of them run companies that're already widely geographically distributed & increasingly remote google.com/amp/s/www.forb…
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