cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/54152859
Proposition 40, which would impose a one-time 5% tax on California billionaires to help fund healthcare, appeared headed for defeat, though votes were still being counted.
Opponents raised hundreds of millions of dollars to fight the measure, far outspending supporters, who argued the tax could help offset federal healthcare cuts.
The campaign also faced opposition from Gov. Gavin Newsom, teachers, business groups and others, while voters weighed concerns about taxing assets and the possibility that billionaires could leave California.
It’s more like 32% of the wealth for the 1%. And most of the 1% is not billionaires. Billionaires own around 5%.
Their real problem is millionaires. Or even just old people in general. People over 55 own 73% of the country’s assets and any time you see that BlackRock and Vanguard and so on own a large share of a large company, that’s their index funds, largely used by retirement funds. Of course even among old people it’s strongly skewed towards the top 10 or 20 percent owning most of the wealth.
Billionaires are just a corner case of the millionaire problem, and taxing millionaires out of existence would also take care of the billionaires.
Those funds exist because businesses dumped pensions and made people become investors. If you want to put a real dent in the investor class, you make pensions 100 percent mandatory for a corporation.
The 50% confusion there is from the wealth of billionaires (1000ish people) being more then the wealth 50% of the population have cumulatively, not 50% of the total wealth of the nation.