The billionaire tax is on the ballot — but so are the weapons against it.
Google founder Sergey Brin has launched — and largely funded — two ballot initiatives that take direct aim at the tax proposal.
One of Brin’s countermeasures would ban taxes on personal property, including retroactive taxes. (The billionaire tax proposes seizing 5% of the wealth and assets of its targets). If it receives more votes than the billionaire tax, then under state law, it would prevail.
The other countermeasure would require audits of new taxes, and would require the proceeds from the billionaire tax to be spent on education — not on health care. That would prevent the SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West, the powerful union that launched the billionaire tax, from benefiting from it.
Brin is fighting fire with fire. And he should be commended for it.
He has left the state — one of many rich Californians who left as soon as the billionaire tax was proposed, because it is retroactive to the first of this year.
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He could simply have decamped to tax-sheltered climes and denounced California from afar. Or he could have just gone quietly.
Instead, he is fighting back — hoping to save California, perhaps to return.
Brin’s organization, Building a Better California, declares: “The California Dream is worth fighting for.”
No doubt — it’s a dream of better weather; of sunshine and surf; of Hollywood starlets and high-tech wealth.
But it’s also a dream about freedom — about a place that prizes anything new, a place that accepts individuals for who they are, a place that sets the trends that change the world.
And most of all, the California Dream is about being able to meet other dreamers.
The kind of people who launch AI startups from garages — and invent Burning Man festivals at the beach.
Many of the billionaires who are leaving the state are self-made. They came up with ideas that worked. They lived the dream.
Then they used their wealth to fulfill the dreams of other people, by hiring them or investing in their companies.
Those are the people the billionaire tax is chasing away.
They will take their wealth to other places. But they won’t be able to re-create the California Dream.
If that dream dies here, it dies everywhere. There is no other California.
