Let's all spare a tear for the billionaires like Sergey, who may suffer grievous financial harm from a wealth tax. He might even have to own fewer private jets! The horror.

This seems like a low effort opinion piece that is unlikely to generate useful discussion here.

I don't understand billionaires. I thought one of their favorite things was to pull up by ladder behind them. Which is why they love regulatory capture so much.

At their levels of wealth money means nothing but a high score. That's all it is. There's nothing they can't buy. They could lose 99.9% of their wealth and that'd still be true. So wouldn't wealth taxes be that same regulatory capture? Put like steep ones but cap at $100bn. Then no one else can get to where they are. No one can climb the ladder they did. (Who am I kidding, no one will buy that)

California went from 235B in 2022 with a surplus, to 317B with a deficit in 2025.

Budgets should be balanced, with smart long term planning and sensible spending. We should not resort to a special “billionaire tax” to fund our mismanaged budgets.

When our high speed rail runs out of funds (and triples in costs with little to show for it), do we slap another billionaire tax? When homeless spending goes missing and doesn’t make a dent, do we add another tax? When cal fair plan goes insolvent?

And then when they’re all gone, we go after the hundred millionaires.

This isn’t the solution. The solution is to fix tax loopholes, that generate sustainable income; with spending that is long term balanced and based on realistic interest rates.

Politicians generally don’t try to solve these hard long term problems, but put up short term patches that are incredibly harmful for the state.