Google Man Peddles Snake Oil

This week, Californians are opening their mailboxes and text messages to find petitions they are urged to sign if they oppose waste and fraud in government spending. “Government has wasted billions of our tax dollars on homelessness and many other failed programs with little to show for it,” the mailings proclaim. “We can’t afford more wasteful spending!”

Recipients’ signatures will go to qualify a measure that will appear on California’s November ballots that, according to the details explained in the small print, will require any new tax laws to conform to existing tax laws.

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These missives have been sent by a committee formed by another committee that was formed by Google’s Sergey Brin and his friends to negate another ballot measure for which signatures are currently being gathered: the one that would establish a one-time 5 percent wealth tax on California’s billionaires. Nothing in the mailings or texts even makes reference to the wealth tax proposal, but that, of course, is their raison d’être. Brin provided $20 million in chump change (well, chump change for Brin) to get this committee off the ground, and this and kindred committees have been reported to be developing other such fraudulent ballot measures that could negate a wealth tax if the one they’re now texting out fails to do the trick.

Kind of makes you wonder if the information you get from googling is as jam-packed with misinformation as Mr. Google’s current messages.

A California poll out today from Politico shows that the wealth tax proposal is currently favored by 50 percent of state voters, while opposed by just 28 percent. That’s no guarantee of wealth tax victory, however. In follow-up questions, 54 percent of Californians said they feared the tax would drive billionaires out of the state, and 67 percent said that if billionaire flight reduced the state’s revenues, middle-class Californians would be taxed more to take up the slack. These are concerns, or more precisely, pseudo-concerns that Brin’s campaigns are sure to raise. Their argument boils down to a simple if ridiculous proposition: Progressive taxation invariably leads to regressive taxation. In which case, of course, the only form of taxes that won’t lead to more regressive taxation is regressive taxation.

Meanwhile, a new New York Times study reports that of all the money donated to presidential, Senate, and House elections in 2024, 19 percent came from about 300 of America’s 1,135 billionaires. In 2008, before the Supreme Court opened the floodgates to limitless campaign funding and before dividends and buybacks swelled the coffers of those Americans whose coffers were already plenty big, billionaire campaign spending amounted to just 0.3 percent of all donations.

The Gilded Age pales in comparison; the legislature purchases of the 1890 robber barons are positively puny when stacked up against the lawmakers and the laws that the Brins and the Bezoses can buy today.

Since the specter of billionaire flight is the main argument that billionaires are advancing to oppose the California wealth tax proposal, the Times survey makes irrefutably clear why a national, rather than a state, wealth tax would be a blessing to the theory and practice of American democracy. Billionaires who renounce their citizenship, like all Americans who renounce their citizenship, are forbidden by law from donating to political campaigns.

I strongly support the California wealth tax, but a national wealth tax would both increase the government’s capacity to address Americans’ needs (assuming some billionaires stay) and reduce the purchase of government by a handful of the very rich (assuming some billionaires leave). That’s called win-win, right?

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