“They should be afraid.” The tech elite vs the first billionaire wealth tax

I mean, I, uh, you know, it, it's always impossible to si- say, but obviously, um, the more that they go out there and say that, the harder it is.

And, and we have another problem, right? At the same time as they're saying, um, they're straight out telling lies.

They're saying this-

Yeah, they are

... would protect, um, middle-class folks and, uh, you know, p- we could change it to anything.

There, there are two problems with that argument.

One, that's not true.

Just to clarify real quick, what they say, like, the counterargument is that I...

The two big ones are, like, we're gonna lose revenue 'cause the billionaires are gonna leave-

Mm-hmm

... and then the other one is...

I have started hearing this thing.

I've looked, and I've looked into.

I can't really find what they're talking about, which they say, "Oh, there's a secret provision in there that lets it, lets us, uh, lets Ca- Sacramento raid ordinary people's pension funds or something."

Right.

And I'm like, "What, what are they even talking about? What is that?"

Absolutely untrue.

So what they're saying that, um, because an initiative, an initi- a citizen's initiative that gets put on the ballot, has a provision to allow the legislature by a two-thirds vote to adjust, um, the process of it, not the substance of it.

So the substance is, and you'll see it on the ballot, a one-time 5% tax on people with assets over a billion dollars.

That's it.

That part can't change.

They can't change the percentage.

Right.

They can't change the one time, and they can't change the billion dollars.

What they could change is, you know, in that 60-page whatever, uh, initiative, is, "Oh, the franchise tax board is on the third day of November supposed to do X," but the legislature could change it because that didn't work.