The Democratic Party, like all Leftists, believes that all your money belongs to them. They have no obligation to be good stewards of that money, of course, as evidenced by the billions (if not trillions) of dollars in fraud we’ve learned about in recent weeks. Rather than clamp down on the rampant fraud, however, Democrats have decided the solution is to take more money from hard-working Americans to line the pockets of the fraudsters and fill Democratic Party coffers.
In California, the Left is proposing the Billionaire Tax Act, which would seize a one-time payment of five percent of a billionaire’s assets — not just their income. On top of that, the bill would apply retroactively to January 1, 2026, even though the measure, which is still in the process of collecting signatures to get on the ballot, wouldn’t go into effect until much later.
Writing for Fox News, Karol Markowicz laid out the details of this latest Democrat cash grab:
The SEIU United Healthcare Workers West, a statewide union of service employees in California, introduced a ballot measure called the Billionaire Tax Act, to implement a one-time 5% tax on the net worth over $1 billion on any California resident. The tax is on total net worth, not income, and would snag rich people who have the bulk of their wealth in stock or property.
The idea has yet to be voted on, and supporters of the measure will need nearly a million signatures by late June to get it on the ballot for November 2026.
But wealthy Californians are already running for the door because the language in the draft of the measure sets the tax retroactively to January 1, 2026, and they know they can’t rely on their fellow Californians to vote down the absurd proposal.
Suzanne Jimenez, a chief of staff for SEIU-UHW who introduced the measure, calls it “a very minor tax.”
Larry Page and Sergey Brin, co-founders of Google, are the latest to bail on California. Garry Tan, president and CEO of Y Combinator and self-described “San Francisco Democrat” explained on X that the wealth tax wouldn’t actually end up being “5%” of a billionaire’s net worth.
“Larry and Sergey can’t stay in California since the wealth tax as written would confiscate 50% of their Alphabet shares. Each own ~3% of Alphabet’s stock, worth about $120 billion each at today’s ~$4 trillion market cap. But because their shares have 10x voting power, the SEIU-UHW California billionaire tax would treat them as owning 30% of Alphabet (3% × 10 = 30%). That means each founder’s taxable wealth would be $1.2 trillion. A 5% wealth tax on $1.2 trillion = $60 billion tax bill, each. That’s 50% of their actual Alphabet holdings—wiped out by a ‘5%’ tax.”
As Markowicz correctly points out, the asset seizure is the point. Not just five percent. Not even 50 percent, but 100 percent of the assets of the wealthy. And it won’t stop there.
As many others pointed out, the income tax was originally meant to target the wealthiest Americans. In 1894, less than 1 percent of American households met the $ 4,000-a-year threshold that would have triggered a 2 percent tax. Today, significantly more people pay the income tax and Democrats keep wanting more.
If you think asset seizures will stop with billionaires, you’re wrong. Billionaires have the capital, as well as the legal and political clout, to pull up stakes for tax-friendlier locales. Soon, they’ll be itching to confiscate the wealth of millionaires, then those with high six-figure incomes.
Pretty soon, my salary will be deemed “wealthy,” and they’ll take that, too.
Socialists always, invariably, want two classes: the impoverished (most of us) and the rich elite (all of them). And upward mobility is not a thing in those communist utopias.
But perhaps we wouldn’t have to tax billionaires — or anyone — so much if we stopped treating fraud as a side-effect of welfare programs and started treating it like the crime it is. In Minnesota alone, estimates are that $9 billion in tax dollars have been stolen, most of it by Somali migrants, through the state’s expansive social welfare programs.
KHANNA: “You’re saying to me … with a 1% tax on wealth that people are going to leave? Come on, have some more patriotism.”
RYAN: “Scott Bessent said yesterday there’s ~$600 BILLION in fraud … Don’t you think we might want to get a handle on that before we tax everybody more?” pic.twitter.com/hknKNj2HBX
— Chief Nerd (@TheChiefNerd) January 16, 2026
Ah, so it’s now “patriotism” to let the government steal what you’ve earned so they can give it to Somalis to fund terror groups. Got it.
Ryan is right to ask where the money is going.
“Our cities are f***ing trashed,” Ryan said. “Where is all the money going?”
“We all see it…everybody sees another billion, more billions allotted to Ukraine, more billions allotted to Israel…everything seems to go out of the country,” Ryan said.
“I’m not going to defend the waste and fraud,” Khanna said.
“Scott Bessent said yesterday there’s ~$600 BILLION in fraud … Don’t you think we might want to get a handle on that before we tax everybody more?”
I would have loved to hear Khanna’s answer to that, but I already know what his answer won’t be: it won’t be a call to end the fraud and punish the fraudsters.
He’ll pay lip service to combating waste and fraud, but never put forth a bill that will cut off the spigot (and oppose any Republican efforts to do so).
Every socialist experiment starts the same way: promise to tax “the rich,” excuse corruption, and shame anyone who objects. Then the tax base widens, the money disappears, and the middle class is crushed. California’s Billionaire Tax Act isn’t new or bold. It’s just the next predictable chapter of the push for socialism. And if history tells us anything, the people writing the rules will never be the ones paying the price.
I’m on the side of the billionaires on this one. They are right to flee California, and the rest of us need to make it clear we will no longer approve government money-grabs so long as the government lets fraud run wild.
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