California’s Tax Proposal Is Already Backfiring

Photo credit: PATRICK T. FALLON / Contributor / AFP via Getty Images

If its ballot measure is approved, California will implement a 5 percent tax on residents with a net worth exceeding $1 billion. When news emerged last year that venture capitalist Peter Thiel and Google co-founder Larry Page would be leaving the state to avoid this potential wealth tax, San Francisco Bay Area Representative Ro Khanna joked that he would miss them.

Rep. Khanna may not be laughing anymore. The tax proposal is already backfiring. By January 1, Thiel, Page, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, film producer Steven Spielberg, financier Don Hankey, and venture capitalist David Sacks had removed an estimated $536 billion in wealth from California’s tax base. “In other words, about a quarter of the act’s wealth-tax base has already vanished before the initiative had even qualified for the ballot,” Shawn Regan writes. With those departures, a new study finds that the measure would bring in about $40 billion—less than half the estimated $100 billion collection.

Read more about the tax and its consequences.

Last week, the White House released a new AI framework that “is meant to invite more feedback into the AI regulatory process” and “pulls back from complete federal preemption to a more devolved model,” Danny Crichton explains. But, he argues, this new direction may be coming too late, with opposition to AI growing.

“Given the backlash, Congress is unlikely to pass new AI legislation,” he writes. “Moreover, many of the framework’s pillars are deeply contested. Businesses are bitterly fighting over copyright and the government is still partially shut down over funding public safety. It’s hard to believe that the specter of China winning the AI race will lead to faster legislative action.”

Read his take on what the White House can do to reduce the AI backlash and garner more support for its efforts to advance the technology.

Love Story, the new FX series that dramatizes the romance between John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette, is already setting streaming records. Over its first five episodes, the show accumulated 25 million hours watched on Hulu and Disney+. Perhaps its popularity owes to JFK Jr.’s legacy, Isabella Redjai observes.

“As one official working with Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at the Health and Human Services Department told me,” she writes, “‘It’s been interesting to see how young people coming of age in today’s Washington, D.C. are drawn to the romanticism of the show. The nostalgia isn’t just for New York City’s Golden Age, or the wistful glamour of the Kennedy family, but for the kind of romance that feels unattainable in our present world.’”

Read more about JFK Jr.’s life and the impression he left on New York.

“You have to look at most progressive policies as job-fare for all the people that have graduated with psychology and ethnic studies degrees over the past 20 years. Then it all makes sense.”