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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tbc I don't think obscure basic or applied research is the place to try to trim fat either, but it's a powerful thing to show people what someone like themselves is buying for the federal government and it's a study about 'roided up hamsters or whatever
I think even smaller decrements will REALLY fire up the typical person, e.g. contracts for $600 hammers
Because most people in this country spend a lot of time thinking about whether to buy the slightly-better-thing when the price difference is like $10
I'd also have had a hard time believing the "Venezuelan gangs are taking over apartment complexes" story if I hadn't had my own utterly insane experience with tenant protection bureaucracy
I think everyone will find something to dislike in my take on Dylan Mulvaney, which is that there is obviously a desperate cultural thirst for someone, anyone, to just wholeheartedly enjoy being a girl in a way that is politically acceptable — and this is probably a good thing!
I do find it reductive and a little bit embarrassing, but man, the culture we have has got to start somewhere. The idea that there is *anything* good about femininity has been MIA for what, a decade? Longer?
While I'm digging my hole, I think trad culture could probably take a note here because a lot of it does come across as very... Girlboss, But With Apron. At times, it delves into "our way is better because it takes 20x as long and hurts." This is not the way, not always
My mom's home in Oregon is being seized by "friends" who she allowed in a few months ago, who now refuse to leave & have literally stolen keys to her outbuildings. It's impossible to navigate her rights & obligations because local housing lawyers are booked up w similar conflicts
They moved two additional people in; mom can't afford to go anywhere else, so she has four people who live rent free in her house and glower at her as they go to and fro, leaving their dishes for her to clean and taking hour-long showers
You cannot imagine how bad tenant-landlord law is in some of these coastal states