From PJMedia.com
Because California is one of those places where bad ideas go to achieve immortality, a wealth tax is being placed back on the table in the state assembly.
You know, it seems like only yesterday [It was only yesterday, Steve —editor.] I reported that progressive groupthink had doomed California to a slow-motion suicide starting 30 years ago. But instead of reversing course, one representative is adding another few drops of arsenic to the state’s coffee supply.
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“Last year alone, billionaire growth grew by $250 billion dollars. That’s the entire size of the state budget,” Assemblyman Alex Lee (D-San Jose) told KCRA 3 News this week, referring to a study by the left-leaning California Budget and Policy Center.
“And if we just impose a 100% wealth tax on those greedy bastards’ unrealized gains,” Lee didn’t say but implied, “then we would have all the money! MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!”
“I’m delighted after so many times of introducing the wealth tax, it’s finally getting its first hearing,” Lee actually did say. Lee’s Bill 259 will be taken up by the Assembly’s Revenue and Taxation Committee this week.
I don’t have to explain to you why a wealth tax is such a supremely stupid idea that it takes a Bay Area socialist to champion it because even Lee’s brother and sister Democrats are having none of it. Brendan Richards, Deputy Comms Director for Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom, almost immediately took to Twitter/X to insist that “a wealth tax is not part of the conversation – wealth tax proposals are going nowhere in California.”
And that’s true. Lee tried to get a hearing on his wealth tax in the Assembly last year. But Democrat assemblycritters shot the proposal with a silver bullet, drove a wooden stake through its heart, chained it in silver, set it ablaze, and finally scattered the ashes on the Santa Ana winds. That’s because the comparative grownups who still run California’s Democrat establishment know they can’t afford to alienate California’s progressive billionaire establishment.
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But that’s now. Tomorrow, like Dracula coming back from the dead for yet another sequel, I suspect will be a different story.
Lee is one of the Democrat-controlled Assembly’s Young Turks, a 28-year-old Bay Area know-nothing progressive who is already serving his second term. He ran as a “democratic socialist” and was even endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America.
In his second race, he defeated his Republican opponent, Bob Brunton, by an almost three-to-one margin. Because people in the Bay Area would rather gnaw off their own elbows than allow themselves to be represented by a Republican who won’t take all their money and use it to weaponize vagrancy.
From Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York to Ilhan Omar in Minnesota to young Mr. Lee in California, socialists appear to be the future of the Democrat party in hardcore pockets across the nation. Lee might not get his wealth tax in 2022 or even in 2023 — but unless his party’s trajectory changes, he’ll get it by 2030 or so. You don’t start running for office at 24 or 25 years old unless you’re on a mission and, whatever their faults are policy-wise, the country’s democratic socialists are committed.
Californians with annual incomes greater than [dr_evil_voice] ONE MILLION DOLLARS [/dr_evil_voice] are “only about one-half of 1% of all tax returns filed in the state but collectively pay about 40% of all California personal income taxes,” the Los Angeles Times reported in 2022.
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These are the same people Lee claims “effectively pay little-to-no taxes,” even though Sacramento’s income tax coffers are almost half-filled by one-two-hundredth of the taxpaying population.
But you know what? I’m done defending the likes of data thief Mark Zuckerberg and mega-polluter Leonardo DiCaprio from the likes of Alex Lee. They wanted to lord it over a permanent underclass, and now that they’ve got one, they’ll have to live with the electoral results.
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