Gov. Gavin Newsom isn't just fighting the billionaire tax. He's backing Prop. 42, which would ban future wealth taxes in California, too.

Not only has Gov. Gavin Newsom vocally opposed the proposed California billionaire tax, but he also wants to prevent the state from ever passing a wealth tax in the future.

On Friday he endorsed Proposition 42, a ballot measure that would cancel out Proposition 40, the proposed billionaire tax. Prop. 42 would prohibit retroactive taxes like the one-time 5% tax on assets that would apply to any billionaire who lived in California on Jan. 1, 2026 if Prop. 40 passes.

But Prop. 42, funded and placed on the ballot by billionaire and Google co-founder Sergey Brin to defeat the billionaire tax, also would go further, by banning any new taxes on personal property.

That includes pensions and 401K accounts before retirees start drawing retirement income from them. It also includes other investments, financial assets, business holdings, art collections and all other forms of personal wealth that would be affected by the billionaire tax or any future wealth tax.

Newsom’s decision to support Prop. 42 runs counter to his own Democratic Party and some labor unions. It also aligns him with some of the wealthy tech donors with whom he’s maintained longstanding relationships dating back to his days as mayor of San Francisco.

  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    18 days ago

    Electing Obama was preferable to electing McCain, was it not?

    It’s difficult to say. Would a John McCain Presidency with a Dem Congressional majority have produced the kind of progressive compromises that Bush/Pelosi and Reagan/O’Neil gave up?

    Would it have all ended like Clinton’s second term, with Corporate Dems selling off the farm while crying about how the President made them do it?

    In the same way it’s difficult to say “Hillary would be better than Trump” without knowing the fresh new horrors her campaign would have inflicted. Or, for that matter, whether a Hillary 2016 just ends in a Trump 2020.

    It’s all empty speculation. And it’s all just predicated on eating what these corrupt organizations churn out.

    This isn’t complicated. The system is dead simple, and certain people keep making the wrong choices.

    The system is what it does. If you think the outcomes are wrong, then you either acknowledge the system itself is broken or you give up on the concept of liberal democracy.

    Because the US isn’t unique. Trumpie candidates have been popping out of neoliberal democratic systems for over a century. “The voters are wrong” is a sentiment directly at odds with the democratic model. The voters can’t be wrong, unless you’ve identified some Guardian Council better suited to select the candidates.

    • adjectivenoun@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      17 days ago

      It’s difficult to say.

      I really don’t think it is. Can you really look around at our current reality: an executive branch shamelessly enriching themselves, a Congress that has ceded all power, a SCOTUS that has enshrined corruption and abuse of power, military and paramilitary in the streets, etc., and think, “well who knows if Harris would have been worse?” Come on, dude. Don’t let your urge to win interwebs arguments override your intellectual honesty. This shit is objectively worse than the alternative, and we don’t have to speculate about it.

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        17 days ago

        Can you really look around at our current reality: an executive branch shamelessly enriching themselves, a Congress that has ceded all power, a SCOTUS that has enshrined corruption and abuse of power, military and paramilitary in the streets, etc., and think, “well who knows if Harris would have been worse?”

        We had all this shit in 2024. We had all this shit in 2004.

        Liberals have an opportunity to clean up politics through prosecution and legislative reforms. They control numerous big wealthy states. They have oodles of cash and a wide network of friendly business interests.

        What would have happened under a Harris Presidency with a Republican Congress? Same shit we got in 2011. Debt crisis. Economic slowdown. More wars. Business bailouts. Hordes of angry racist voters blaming women and minorities for all their problems. An incompetent boob in the White House poisoning the country against everything they stand for.

        This shit is objectively worse

        Worse than what? We’ve been sliding downhill since 2001. Every year is worse than the last, with vanishingly few exceptions.

        This isn’t a problem of a single person making a handful of bad decisions. It’s endemic to the entirely national leadership, from city councillors to SCOTUS judges.