They did a really good job on ads. Don’t look up how much they spent just on fooling the population.
It’s not just thinking about the billionaires.
It’s also not thinking about the suffering people whose healthcare was stolen for these billionaires and will not be restored. Their plight is far more important than billionaires crying about taxes.
- California nearly achieved universal healthcare. Now, millions are losing coverage
- Healthcare costs are surging. Taxing billionaires will help Californians keep their coverage
TBH I’m so sick of hearing about these rich scumbags. Capitalist media focusing on billionaires is the usual bullshit, privileged distraction.
(Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_California_Proposition_40)
As tv ads continued to play, it affected how people thought about the proposition. Remember, people are really stupid and it’s really easy to change their opinions on things.
people are really stupid
Wrong. People are generally intelligent.
Propaganda is just very effective, even against intelligent people, and most people don’t have the extra time/energy or desire to investigate each prop. Which is a structural failure to not prioritize it, but that’s the point. There are systems in place to make political research feel both not important and also very exhausting. You live in a society full of very intelligent people, a slice of those intelligent people use their positions of power to add layers upon layers of friction to the political system so that they can retain their power.
You are not surrounded by idiots, but, you ARE ruled by criminals.
I guess to me, passing this seemed like a no-brainer and there isn’t any amount of propaganda that could sway me on that. How people are so confused about voting in their interests is surprising to me. But I think you have an interesting point.
That’s great, but just because you happen to be informed & engaged doesn’t mean the people that aren’t are stupid.
I’m in favor of a wealth tax as a corrective measure, which is how this prop was structured, but on as a broader recurring tax I am against it. If I was less informed on this prop or otherwise held a stronger “If it’s wrong to do it recurring then it’s wrong always” position, then I would have voted against it. It doesn’t take much effort to empathize with why people would be against new tax structures.
Yeah, that seems like a strange argument yo me when you look at wages over time adjusted for ibflation among the wealth classes. There really shouldn’t be much of an argument.
Imagine not being a billionaire and voting to not tax them.
Humans are real dumb. I’m honestly shocked we aren’t still throwing feces at each other while arguing who gets the best spot in the cave.
The really frustrating part is that many Californians also voted to increase sales taxes again. Sales taxes are incredibly regressive.
They ran so many ads. I was visiting family in CA a few weeks ago and every second commercial was saying if the law passes they’ll use it to put a tax on everyone. Obviously bullshit but I can understand why some lower half of the bell curve people would believe it.
I was visiting family in CA a few weeks ago and every second commercial was saying if the law passes they’ll use it to put a tax on everyone. Obviously bullshit but I can understand why some lower half of the bell curve people would believe it.
Honestly that is a very fair point. Federal income tax was initially passed as a wartime measure and only applied to the wealthiest people. Over time inflation and necessity lowered the threshold lower and lower until everyone had to file income tax.
I’m in favor of wealth taxes on billionaires, but you have to admit, it does establish a dangerous precedent. Someone with a few million in a 401k is fantastically wealthy by the standards of someone working paycheck to paycheck for minimum wage. Why wouldn’t they support a wealth tax on people’s 401k balances?
The slippery slope fallacy here does not apply. We have clear historical examples of taxes that were originally meant to only apply to the rich growing in scope until they were applied to the whole population. It’s actually a pretty likely outcome if wealth taxes became more common. Every other tax expanded to encompass the entire population, why not wealth taxes?
Wealth taxes kinda already have been applied to the entire population, except the ultra rich. You pay property taxes, and those definitely go up based on unrealized gains.
Not taking them is a worse precedent. Every year their wealth grows.
The slippery slope fallacy here does not apply.
It is absolutely a fallacy to say we can’t possibly levy a tax on a billionaire lest it, ultimately becomes a tax on us.
Already they have a pretty sweet deal compared to most folks, most folks have most of their ‘wealth’ taxed as property. Since real property is a tiny sliver of their ‘wealth’, they get to keep more percentage wise than the random person, despite needing it less.
To say any tax might evolve into a tax on the common man is like saying we can’t regulate nuclear weapons, lest it becomes a regulation preventing people from having scissors. Yes, there is the example of income tax and a mistake was made at the time they went to expand it. The problem was not the initial tax, it was the point of expansion. There’s no reason the expansion of the tax should have any lower barrier than getting it levied in the first place.
Now if you argue that the measure was somehow flawed in that it failed to limit the scope and explicitly opened the door to things, but it was the opposite, a one-time, billionaire only scoped event.
Nothing stopping us from voting people in who will raise income tax brackets so only the top 10% pays them.
Nothing but us and our lack of imagination. We can do the same with wealth taxes and the 1%.
Or we can surrender in advance and allow them to continue our March to poverty.
Income taxes were added to the constitution in 1913 and weren’t limited to only the most wealthy people.
In inflation adjusted dollars, the tax applied a 1% income tax to incomes over $100k and a 7% tax to incomes over $16 million. Yes, it was originally intended only for the wealthy. The upper middle class paid a tiny nominal 1%. The only people paying any substantial income tax were the extremely wealthy.
I get it. You want to tax the rich, so do I. But you’re letting that desire cloud your judgment and reason.
This is why I try to think hard about “temporary” sales taxes and fees and the like. There is about zero chance that tax meets the stated goal and is repealed, if not expanded.
Lots of comments in all the blue tsunami posts talking about how the public must finally “get it”. They now think like rational humans who will choose what’s best for a society and in their own best interest.
At best this is reactionary revenge voting meant to punish the ruling party for the ways policies have impacted them recently. I think the next election we’ll be right back to a split government with no power to undo any of the techbro billionaire fascist ratcheting that has happened the last decade.
Gas, its about gas.
Kinda funny to take the electorate behaving the way they’ve always behaved as evidence of something unprecedented happening.
arent we though? cyclosporidia and gentrification?
But what if I become a billionaire? \s
Damn, americans are so brainwashed.
Workship capital and billionaires because hey, IT COULD YOU! You’re just about to make it, and once you do, of course it will all be 100% based on merit and fuck these poor people with a loser state of mind.
One might suggest, given Canadian elections in the last few years, that you exhibit a little more humility, because one can easily point out that Canadians are very stupid too, for staying home and not voting, allowing conservative parties to sweep their provinces.
One might also suggest that Canadians politics, even conservative ones, are not a threat to very survival of the human species, that the country has had free health care, gun laws and abortion rights for decades now, and that the Canadian liberal Prime Minister never threatened to annex other countries or launch a trade war, all while not being an elected pedophile. One might agree that Canada is real farnfrom being a perfect country, but any comparison to the USA is laughable.
I’m apparently so out of touch I can’t even fathom how this happened.
I know there was obviously billionaire campaigning but what was their argument? Just lies that it would somehow affect the average person? Or 60% of the state think they’re temporarily embarrassed billionaires?
This is like last cycle when we voted to keep prison slavery legal… I thought ok who is going to vote this way? Like what the fuck is wrong with people?
All of that, that the bill isn’t perfect, and there might be loopholes, and it’s hard to actually figure out what “assets” are, and on and on. Never mind the fact that any starting point would be better than nothing.
I mean even fucking Planned Parenthood came out against it [1], which is profoundly disappointing.
Sergey Brin alone supposedly spent at least $100 million to defeat it [2]. The motherfuckers even funded three different poison pill props to neutralize it. Pretty much every tactic they could use they did. Newsome and Becerra being against it didn’t help either.
Surprisingly level headed response from Jensen Huang. 5% is a drop in the bucket for these billionaires and they act like it’s going to impoverish them.
The billionaires were panicking because their wealth was by the controlling shares in their own company. There can be two types of shares, ones that have decision making power and others that don’t, just for trading. If billionaires had to give up their controlling shares to pay the tax bill, that would dilute their control. They didn’t want that.
Jensen’s shares are the other kind. He can pay the tax bill without losing control. He’s more ok with this than the Zuck. Zuck’s entire wealth comes from owning 99% of the controlling shares.
He’s a decent guy, or he was, before he put himself in bad company. NVIDIA has never done layoffs.
Being a billionaire automatically excludes you from being a “good guy.”
10 million people starve to death or die from preventable disease each year. Who the hell could have a conscience and become a billionaire in the face of that?
This guy?
He writes on boobs and he doesn’t lay off employees. Seems okay except for the AI psychosis.
I don’t think he has AI psychosis. He’s selling shovels, so he’s encouraging the behavior to keep selling more
Yep
Wow that took a while to find exactly their rationale for not supporting it and:
would provide only a one-time revenue boost at a time when California needs ongoing funding to recover from the impact of the federal One Big Beautiful Bill Act,
So it’s a ‘let the perfect be the enemy of the good’ scenario. It’s not good enough so better to not do anything in hopes that it will inspire more durable approach… Ugh…
If it was just that, I would agree, but the problems went deeper than just “it’s a start but not good enough”
The beneficiaries of the fund was a SINGLE union, not the whole state, and there were poison pill provisions ensuring that we couldn’t do it again in future, so this would have been a one and done, not a prescident like we all hoped. So basically it was bound to fail to accomplish what we would hope even if it passed and would likely make things more difficult to get an actual tax, instead of just a narrowly applied windfall
I mean even fucking Planned Parenthood came out against it [1], which is profoundly disappointing.
??? TF?
would provide only a one-time revenue boost at a time when California needs ongoing funding to recover from the impact of the federal One Big Beautiful Bill Act,
They are taking the long winning strategy of “perfect is the enemy of the good”. If we don’t pass a one time tax now, maybe that will by some mysterious mechanism cause a more durable tax later.
three different poison pill props to neutralize it.
Two poison pill propositions, 41 and 42.
But…while we can’t say for sure yet, at this point in time, extrapolating from the results that are in, Prop 40 probably lost outright on its own, independently of Prop 41 and Prop 42 (though Prop 42 does look likely to pass).
43 was of the same ilk.
It related to taxes, but it would not have neutralized Prop 40. This attempt to kill a piece of legislation is what a “poison pill” is.
I mean even fucking Planned Parenthood came out against it [1], which is profoundly disappointing.
Planned Parenthood is not just a fucked up, condescending, outdated, eugenicist name. It’s a right-wing organization (liberals). Don’t expect much from them.
I’ve been telling everyone the entire election cycle that we were being propagandized to hell here in CA. Every single commercial break had at least one ad about how the wealth tax was going to be used to tax regular Californians because of a “loophole” (incredibly dishonest reading of the text that almost certainly wouldn’t have survived court had anyone tried it).
SO many anti wealth tax ads reaching all kinds of demographics too. I watch some foriegn language content and would get spammed with propaganda ads in said language. That’s when I knew it was done for
Billionaires don’t need arguments when they can carpet bomb the state with bullshit advertisements.
bingo. they convinced a huge number of people that they would be getting taxed more (even though they aren’t billionaires) if this billionaire tax went through. People are stupid and VERY lazy and didn’t check the sources of where this bullshit was coming from.
I think the rejection is pretty straightforward… It’s a lack of trust. California doesn’t have a revenue problem; it’s got a spending problem. When you couple that with some well known cases of “taxes on the wealthy” morphing into taxes on the ordinary over time (like AMT), it makes voters suspicious that this proposition was actually for it’s stated purpose, and even though slippery slopes are a logical fallacy, people don’t always employ logic when voting.
There are other factors too of course, but the bill’s sponsors failed to overcome the general distrust voters have of their elected officials and California tax authorities.
Yeah, well said. It will take a lot to get Californian voters to overcome their distrust of their tax collectors
It definitely does have a revenue problem, trumps OBBB gutted federal funding for medi-cal and cal-fresh and the state can’t cover those gaps without more tax revenue.
Unless you want to say that food and healthcare for the poor are “spending problems”
I thought 40 was gonna be an easy one… then I briefly brought it up with my gymmates and… ufff… They just automatically vote against anything related to taxes. It didn’t seem like they actually read what the prop was. It literally just affected like 200 people out of millions…
Local propaganda branded 40 as an “everyone tax”. Straight up lies, but people don’t read stuff I guess? IDK.
They just automatically vote against anything related to taxes. It didn’t seem like they actually read what the prop was. It literally just affected like 200 people out of millions…
And that’s how we get red states!
but people don’t read stuff I guess?
I mean people voted for Trump…3 times…stating he’s a good businessman so he can run the country when there’s mountains of documentation proving he’s a fraud and failed businessman. I remember in high school there were kids that couldn’t make it through a sentence when it was their turn to read out loud.
If there’s anything the last decade has taught me, it’s that the majority of humans, especially Americans, are duuuuuuuuumb.
People definitely don’t read stuff, but they never do. The lies usually work, and it’s hard to outspend wealthy people. T
That said, I’m surprised it’s as close as it is. In the larger chess match of politics, you could argue that this is a decent result. Even if it passed, there wasn’t gonna be material revenue from this proposition for years, if ever, and the conversation would shift from taxing the billionaires to overreach by tax authorities. This result allows the conversation to stay focused on the political fuckery of billionaires. It keeps people outraged and engaged, and motivated to find solutions to the problem (which I don’t think this would have yielded).
I saw ads being run claiming they would take your 401k from you. Total bull but it worked.
Those were the worst
Is it bullshit though? This exact proposal, sure. But every other tax that was initially applied only to the wealthy eventually expanded to hit the entire population. Look at income taxes. They applied initially only to the ultra wealthy. Why should wealth taxes be any different? It’s not a slippery slope fallacy if you can point to actual historical examples of a very thing happening.
Is it bullshit though?
Yes.
You’re letting partisanship blind your reason. The income tax in the US originally 1% on incomes over $3000 and 7% on incomes over $500,000. That would be like a 1% income applied to incomes over $100k and 7% applied to incomes over $16 million.
The US federal income tax was indeed initially something only applied to the very wealthy. The upper middle class paid a nominal 1% income tax, but only the truly wealthy had to pay substantial income tax. It expanded over time to hit the entire population.
So no, it’s not bullshit. Taxes expand over time. I’m in favor of taxing the wealthy, but I also try not to let my personal biases cloud my reason. I suggest you do the same.
Then you intervene at the point where it is about to happen, not when it might one day maybe happen.
Historically that intervention hasn’t worked out is their point.
That is some crap that is convenient for the billionaires, we can’t possibly implement any progressive tax strategy lest it degrades from a progressive tax strategy.
I’ll admit the law is a slog of a read, but it is pretty clearly scoped to one time and requiring over a billion in assets. There’s no open door for expanding it to broader set of people. The folks bemoaning that it’s unclear on what counts as an “asset”… That point doesn’t matter because the common voter doesn’t have any asset that could be in that class…
Honestly I’m hoping for widespread tax resistance, which is hard if you own a factory and easy if you have nothing.
Might have something to do with this
https://edsource.org/updates/california-has-the-lowest-literacy-rate-of-any-state-data-suggests
I hate people.
Ah fuck, this is how I find out?
Must not have even been close if it’s already decided, we take forever for this typically.
Oh well. Fuck em, I want a national, if not international solution anyway. If Blue Texas is any reminder, there is no war but class war and Californian Corporate Dems aren’t an ally on that. If anything, we need a national movement of pissed off poor folk to lead the charge on this.
It wasn’t close at all. I could tell it had failed not long after polls closed from the results.
Sad. Though, I’m not with the others willing to just blame ads nor “taxes = bad” folk… there’s just too many people who are the Gavin Newsom type. I’m honestly not at all surprised, every state is technically purple, including ours.
At least everyone I’ve met today has been so positive and happy, it’s a real change from the Los Angeles I’m used to.
Edit: still 6 million votes uncounted, including mine. AP decided to wait on calling 40, 41, and 42 but it doesn’t look good. LA is very pro-40, but neighboring Orange County is the opposite. God I hate them, lol.
Also Angeleno, that’s been my perception as well. In general it was a good election and we’re better off than before.
Perhaps I’ve been too harsh on the idea of re-education camps. We need to not just improve K-12 schooling, we need to expand adult schooling.
Reeducation camps are the humanitarian alternative.
I thought that was soylent
I think everyone should need to pass a basic intelligence quiz to be eligible to vote. Very strict guidelines on what questions are allowed to appear because I mean super basic info.
Like
1+3*3=? And circling the correct diagram of the water cycle. Very easy questions anybody with a 5th grade intelligence level could answer.
I think you should study your American history a little more before saying stuff like this.
I’m aware of history, that’s not what I suggested.
How is what you suggested different?
I’m not suggesting it be administered by individuals who can discriminate for one. Also would want strict guidelines for what can be asked, I’m imagining a set of around 100 questions and you just get a random one on your ballot and there’s no leeway for states to edit the list. There are a plethora of other aspects that would need to be hammered out because there is absolutely room for fuckery, but that doesn’t mean it’s not possible. Some states actually ran successful voter test programs prior to the idea being twisted by the South. Just because something’s been misused in the past doesn’t necessarily mean that’s the only potential outcome.
I would also prefer just educating people better so no test would even be necessary, but conservatives won’t fund education so we’re left with a bunch of dummies just voting for anything that says their political affiliation next to it.
Some states actually ran successful voter test programs
Really? Which ones?
I couldn’t find any with my internet sleuthing skills. Just a bunch of stuff about voter suppression.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=have+there+ever+been+studies+about+voting+tests&ia=web
I believe that any test, even if done in good faith initially, will inevitably lead to voter suppression against some minority group.
“Literacy tests did not begin as a racist tool. Connecticut adopted the first literacy requirement for voting in 1855 as part of its new state constitution, with the stated goal of preventing voter fraud and ensuring voters could understand ballot questions. Massachusetts, Maine, and several other Northern states followed with similar requirements in the decades that followed.”
https://www.cuip.org/what-were-literacy-tests-for-voting/
A test will inherently disenfranchise a group, that’s the point though; disenfranchise the least intelligent and easiest to manipulate across the population. Like I said, I’d rather we just educated people better and they weren’t so easily manipulated but how do you deal with existing adults who will never be able to meaningfully detect bias and propaganda? I don’t think there’s a correct answer.
You seem to be under the misconception that the purpose of democracy is to select the objectively best governmental policy, as if such a thing could ever exist. That is not the purpose of democracy. If you want that kind of system, you want technocracy, not democracy.
The purpose of democracy is to keep us from killing each other. THAT is the purpose of democracy. It’s too give enough people enough of a voice in government that very few people think starting a civil war is a necessary and proper course of action. It has nothing to do with selecting the “best” governmental policy, as that’s entirely subjective.
The reason you don’t want filter voters based on intelligence is that stupid people can use firearms just fine.
“stupid people can use firearms just fine.” that’s why you don’t want them aligned with power (see ICE). If they are not aligned with power, they are just domestic terrorists. And they are not that numerous. J6 showed how many of them is actually willing to show up for a fight. Not an unmanageable number. Definitely not enough to start a civil war back then. Now, with government backing, yes.
You say this as if people wanting to kill each other is normal, and not mostly a result of class dynamics stemming from modes of production.
Shit, I must have missed the memo about world peace happening.
We have archaeological evidence of mass violence and war back when human beings were all living as classless egalitarian hunter gatherers. We’ve found mass graves that old.
Marxists lose the plot when they insist on analyzing everything through the lens of class struggle.
| stupid people can use firearms just fine
🙋🏼♂️
I know a small business owner that was afraid if this passed, “they” would come for him next.
“are ‘they’ in the room with us right now?”
In your walls watching you do that weird thing.
Don’t threaten me with a good time
I knew it!
The same state that voted to keep slavery 2 years ago? No way!
Wtf are you talking about?
There are a lot of Californians that think they’re a billionaire.
