California Initiative Seeks To Send Last Of Rich Running

Written by: Evrviglnt on Monday, August 11th, 2008

This is astounding.   California is one of the world’s largest economies – it rivals whole countries.  Economies depend on investment, an educated labor pool and a rewarding business environment.  Government’s influence on the business climate can be counter-productive, considering that a zero tax rate would maximize investment and a punitive tax rate would repel it.  What condition is California in?  Investment is fleeing, educational quality is poor, and the government seems to think businesses are here to fund government.  We’re heading for a 16 billion dollar deficit, we still don’t have a budget after months of haggling, and the only answers we’re getting from the Democrats who control the state and the governor who takes orders from them is to raise taxes, lower the threshold for passing budgets and increase spending.  But it may get even better.  Here’s how the Los Angeles Times blog describes it:

 Democratic and Republican lawmakers in Sacramento just might be bailed out of their budget standoff by a new initiative that would slap a one-time wealth tax of 55% on Californians rude enough to have $20 million or more in property. The ballot measure wouldn’t come to voters until June 2010 at the earliest, but that might not be a problem, seeing as how the current year’s budget will probably still be stalled.

And…

Most of the revenue would be used to balance the budget provide for the poor improve educationbuild rapid transit, umm, no, try again.

Most of the revenue would be used to buy Exxon-Mobil. And Chevron. And GM, Ford, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan Chase, and Citigroup. Why? To assure California of an adequate supply of energy, at stable prices, without offshore drilling. And to repatriate off-shore manufacturers.

Oh, and to restore the Hetch-Hetchy Valley, which currently is a reservoir supplying water to the Bay Area, to the way it was at the beginning of the last century.

And if you’re a rich guy who plans on skipping out on California once this passes, you’re gonna have to pay to leave.  Remember, you’re the bad guy.

How can it be that a state that has such an impact on the country’s economy, not to mention rippling effects around the world, be run by a government so incompetent that the only way it can get re-elected is to have voters who are dumber than they are?  It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy – and we’ll be eating our shoes before we can tax ourselves into prosperity!  The initiative is called “The McCauley-Rooker Wealth Tax and Oceans Preservation Act.”  Read the thinking behind this steaming pile of Edwardian bullshit:

Section 2.  The people of the State of California find and declare all of the following:

(a) The concentration of private wealth in the hands of the few is inconsistent with the tenets of a democratic society.

(b) Staggering sums of wealth have come to be concentrated in the hands of a tiny percentage of the population coinciding with the growing poverty for tens of millions of persons, declining living standards and worsening economic security for tens of millions more. 

(c) There has been, in recent decades, a massive shift in wealth and income from the poor and middle class to the rich and wealthy.  The process by which the targets of this initiative acquired their wealth in the first instance was the most radical transfer of wealth in American history, and this measure is a modest attempt to redress the increasingly dangerous imbalances that this concentration of social power has created.

(d) Coincident with massive wealth transfers has been the ongoing destruction of the global environment, including the destruction of fisheries, oceans, glaciers, sea life, forests and the global ecosystem. 

(e) Massive concentrations of financial power have fueled the globalization of the American economy, undermined American’s traditional manufacturing, industrial and agricultural strength and substituted a class of money changers and speculators.  The concentrated financial power has wholly undermined free democratic institutions, created a new breed of public office holder wholly beholden to its power and reduced America to a debtor nation and a nation of debtors. 

(f)  This act proposes to restore a measure of balance in wealth between persons living in California, to salvage the global ecosystem from ongoing destruction and to restore public supervision and influence over the nation’s largest financial institutions.

The 55% tax on those owning more than $20 million in property will be used to buy stock in companies better run by the state.  Please read the proposition – I haven’t seen anything this atrocious since my college professor tried to explain to me how socialism was about ‘fairness.’  This is theft in the name of environmentalism – and it will probably pass in California.  Will somebody please wake me from this nightmare?

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Topics: California Politics

One Response to “California Initiative Seeks To Send Last Of Rich Running”

David M Says:
August 12th, 2008 at 10:49 am

The Thunder Run has linked to this post in the – Web Reconnaissance for 08/12/2008 A short recon of what’s out there that might draw your attention, updated throughout the day…so check back often.

 

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