relocating in income-tax-free Florida. The exodus is clearly in response to the probability that voters will approve a special tax on billionaires this fall.
Most reports indicate the tax will be a one-time levy of 5% on billionaires. But due “to aggressive design choices and possible drafting errors, the actual rate on taxpayers’ net worth could be dramatically higher,” the Tax Foundation says.
It might also be more lasting than just a single assessment. As we closed out 2025, we warned that “no one should kid themselves about” the tax sunsetting as promised:
California voters approved Proposition 30 in 2012, a ‘temporary tax’ on the state’s high-income earners to underwrite education spending. It was extended in 2016. For now, it will sunset in 2031. But there’s never enough of someone else’s money, so the usual agitators want to make it permanent by placing it on the 2026 ballot in tandem with the Billionaire Tax Act.
Because there’s never enough of other people’s money, we expect that millionaires will be next in line for the shakedown. This is not some irresponsible claim because California tried just a few years to reach deeper into the wealthy’s pockets with a bill that would have hit couples whose net worths exceeded $50 million with an additional tax. Just because it failed, it doesn’t mean that the junior Castro-ites in Sacramento will abandon the idea.
It’s rather demoralizing that in our society, billionaires are demonized. When Robert Reich, now a University of California, Berkeley professor who imparted leftist counsel to past presidents, says he wants the U.S. to drive billionaires “to extinction,” and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani says “I don’t think we shouldn’t have billionaires,” they are cheered, not jeered, by the products of public education that is dominated by leftist ideology.
In a sane and reasonable world, we would all agree that California — as do all states — needs billionaires. They use their capital to increase wealth all around, create jobs, develop life-enhancing and lifesaving innovations, dream up and build modern conveniences, invest in talented and driven people, manufacture markets that had never before existed and underwrite philanthropy.
Or put another way, “Everything you love about life was either made by God or a billionaire.”
Or put yet another way, the recipients of the redistribution of wealth taken by taxation can do none of those things.
Contrary to the lies constantly dropped on us by Democrats and progressives, billionaires also pay taxes, and after they’ve quit California, they’ll be paying them in other states. To see how destructive this will be, consider that at the federal level, the wealthiest 1% in the country pay 41% of the income taxes, while the top 10% pay 72%. In California, those who earn more than $1 million a year provide roughly 40% of income tax revenues.
California seems destined to find itself in a struggle to retain any part of what it once was. Sure, it can survive if half of its 200 or so billionaires flee. But California was never about survival, it was about opportunity, growth, the future. It can be again, but not until the ideologues who have all the political power are thrown out.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
I & I Editorial Board
The Issues and Insights Editorial Board has decades of experience in journalism, commentary and public policy.
