Desperate California legislators want to shake down their fleeing population
Washington Examiner
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Several states are attempting to pass wealth taxes. As we noted this week, this effort is silly and doomed, as history and math demonstrate.
California legislators are attempting to top all the others, however, as only they on the extreme-left coast know how. They are trying to do something even more astonishing, kooky, and obviously unconstitutional.
THE DOJ IS MOVING IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION ON ANTITRUST
Desperate to stem the stampede of cash cows — affluent residents — out of their state, they are trying to pass an exit tax for households with assets of $50 million or more. Current residents would have to keep paying for years after they have decamped to less hostile states.
Heaven forbid that these legislators should instead come to terms with the reasons so many productive residents flee or what they could do to make their state a more attractive destination for people and businesses. They aren’t much concerned with that, merely with stopping the flight of all that revenue. If they cared about the livelihoods of the people leaving, they probably would have governed in a way that didn’t prompt people to head for the exits.
The Golden State has been losing residents to other states through net domestic migration for 21 years in a row, but until recently, they were able to make up the difference with births and international migration. Starting in 2020, however, California began losing population in absolute terms — 300,000 people, or the population equivalent of Pittsburgh, in just two years. Yet somehow, it seems not to occur to the Democrats who dominate the state’s politics that this is happening because they govern so badly.
Leftist legislators in the one-party paradise have neither a clue nor a desire to understand why people don’t want to live in a state where middle-income earners’ tax rates are higher than what millionaires pay in most other states. People also don’t like that nearly every product they purchase is obliged to have a label stating that it causes cancer and that Californian pols try to massacre the gig economy to help moribund but politically connected labor unions.
Who wants to live in a state where out-of-touch bureaucrats are still trying to impose new COVID restrictions on freedom of movement and speech? Arbitrary decarbonization goals result in the nation’s highest electricity rates and more than twice as many blackouts as any other state. There is essentially no hope of producing enough electricity to charge all the electric cars politicians are forcing everyone to buy.
For nearly two decades, California’s state government has obsessed over building a $105 billion high-speed train. It may never be finished, and few will ride it if it is. The biggest problem with this train isn’t that its first phase won’t reach Los Angeles or San Francisco but rather that it doesn’t get to Phoenix or Boise, Idaho, where middle-class Californians would probably rather go permanently.
As California Democrats pursue economic refugees fleeing their state, other states are attracting residents and revenue by respecting personal freedoms, reducing taxes, simplifying and repealing unneeded regulations, and refocusing education systems on learning instead of political indoctrination. States can work well when they are willing to make it happen. California should try it for a change.
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