California is facing an almost record-high budget deficit this year after blowing through two years worth of budget surpluses. This year, it is estimated that the deficit for California is between $68 and $38 billion, depending on which party you talk to. Of course, when you talk to the Newsom camp, you will always get the lower number, because they are the most fiduciary responsible party in the state. If you could see me writing that last sentence you would also see a pair of eyeballs rolling off my desk.
Read CAGOP Chairwoman Jessica @MillanPatterson’s full statement on Newsom’s blundering budget. pic.twitter.com/EeSABKfBex
— CAGOP (@CAGOP) January 10, 2024
But how could California Democrats have gone from an almost $24 billion surplus, to get to a bare minimum of $38 billion deficit? They ran out of taxpayers, that’s why. Specifically speaking, they ran out of millionaires and billionaires to tax, because they are fleeing the state in droves.
Analysis of the approximately 750,000 people who have bid farewell to California over the last three years has revealed that thousands more high-earning, well-educated workers have left the Golden State than have moved in. “I’m seeing anywhere from two to five clients a month calling me and saying ‘We’re leaving,’” Todd Litman, an estate planning attorney told Sky News. “They have $1 million to $2 million sitting in their IRA and they’re saying: ‘When I retire and start pulling that IRA out, I’m going to be paying 13% state income tax, so I don’t want to do that.’ So, they’re heading out because of that reason.”
California Democrats are purging the state of some of its highest-earning residents and businesses due to massive taxation policies foisted on them. And these residents and businesses are fed up with being the Democrats’ budget cash cows.
Even though Newsom and his money-grabbing Democratic allies in the State Assembly and Senate will say that the “rich need to pay their fair share,” the facts say that they do. The state’s highest income earners pay roughly 40-50 percent of the state’s personal income tax revenue. Now they are scrambling to tighten their grips on the remaining cash cows the state has left by passing another law that raises the taxes even further.
Democratic Assemblyman Alex Lee’s Assembly Bill 259, which was shelved early on in 2023 after it was introduced, would levy an additional 1.5 percent tax on the assets of California’s highest earners in 2024. It would further impose an additional 1 percent tax on the assets of all earners of $50 million or more in 2026.
“I’m delighted after so many times of introducing the wealth tax, it’s finally getting its first hearing,” Lee told KCRA 3 on Monday. “It would be the fiscally responsible thing to look at the people who effectively pay little-to-no taxes than ask again for the working class or middle-class people to shoulder cuts or shoulder new taxes.”
In his statement, Lee continued the lie that the rich aren’t paying taxes and they need to be punished. Never in my life while growing up did I ever imagine a government imposing a “wealth tax.”
It goes in the same line as California’s notorious vehicle taxes, where you have a gas guzzler tax, which was passed to dissuade or discourage people from buying cars with gas mileage lower than 22 miles per gallon.
Lee and his fellow Democrat robbers are doubling down on a policy agenda that would continue drive more and more people out of the state. Businesses and top-income earners both are going to keep packing up and leaving because they are tired of losing money. Moreover, they are tired of being used as cash cows for Democrat’s reckless spending ideas.
I am not a rich man by any means, though I do live a fairly comfortable life. And as a person who doesn’t make anywhere near what the super-rich make, I think what the Democrats are doing to them is morally repugnant. I don’t care how someone made their money unless they made it through illegal means. Why should I or anyone else for that matter be entitled to more of their money? As the saying goes, don’t hate the player, hate the game.
What the Democrats unfortunately continue to do is to bend over the California taxpayer and do you know what to our bank accounts and wallets.
We had a saying, rather an acronym, in the Marine Corps; it was called BOHICA. It stands for Bend Over, Here It Comes Again; it was a figurative reference to a few different things but mainly it means that someone is about to screw you over on something.
California is becoming the land of taxes, whether they’re a high-income tax, wealth tax, gas tax, tobacco tax, or taxes on a tax. Ok, that last one doesn’t exist; yet, but you get my point.
The takeaway here is that sooner or later, the left is going to run out of taxpayers to pay for all their pet programs and wasteful government projects like the “high speed” rail that really isn’t a high-speed train and doesn’t go from San Francisco to Los Angeles like they said it would when they first sold it to us. And when they run out of tax payers, the state will go further into debt because it can’t pay the bills. But even worse, the remaining taxpayers of the lower and middle class, will have to pick up that burden. And if you think it’s expensive to live in California now, you just wait.
