If You Tax Them, Will They Leave?
28th January 2026
The Atlantic, a Voice of the Crust.
to hear some Silicon Valley insiders tell it, California is on the verge of economic suicide. This November, Californians will likely vote on a ballot initiative that would levy a one-off tax on the wealth of about 200 of the state’s richest residents. Garry Tan, the CEO of the start-up incubator Y Combinator, posted on X that the measure would “kill and eat the golden goose of technology startups in California.” Investors and tech executives are threatening to leave the state. Governor Gavin Newsom, who has been angling for a centrist presidential pivot, has vowed to “do what I have to do” to stop the initiative.
Sure, I believe that.
Many progressives, however, see the billionaire tax as a long-overdue effort to finally force the ultra-wealthy to pay their fair share. Senator Bernie Sanders, for example, calls it a “model that should be emulated throughout the country.” In their telling, hyperbolic claims about the death of innovation and entrepreneurship in California are a smoke screen for the fact that billionaires simply don’t want to pay higher taxes.
They keep bloviating about ‘their fair share’ but none of them will give you an exact definition of what ‘fair share’ means—they’re just sure that what’s now is not it. They also won’t explain why the current ‘share’ is not ‘fair’.
The essence of the progressive ideology is that progressives ought to be able to spend your money whether you like it or not. Progressives are thieves, pure and simple.
The unfortunate reality for progressive backers of the wealth tax is that what billionaires think about the policy, and how they react to it, will determine whether it succeeds. If voters approve the tax, they will be making a huge bet on billionaire psychology. That would be a very high-stakes wager indeed.
And the more they are assholes about it, the more billionaires will leave. Progressives are, in a free society, their own worst enemies.
the california wealth-tax idea originated as a response to a federal tax cut. Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act lowered taxes for corporations and rich individuals and paid for those cuts in part by reducing Medicaid spending. That left a roughly $20 billion annual shortfall in California’s health-care budget. If left unfilled, that could cause 1.6 million low-income Californians to lose their health care, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. In response, one of the state’s largest health-care-employee unions teamed up with a group of progressive economists and lawyers to come up with a way to make up the difference: impose a one-off 5 percent wealth tax on California’s billionaires.
“Hold still while we pick your pocket.”