Absurdities of Our Age

Victor Davis Hanson

Despite Bernie Sanders’ rants, four out of ten American households pay no income tax. And the bottom fifty percent in income, of those who do pay income tax, account for less than 3% of all federal income tax revenue. The top 50 percent of households pay 97% of all federal taxes. About 30 percent of Americans are on some sort of local/state/federal assistance. In other words, the American tax rate is among the most progressive in the world. The point is not that anyone is calling again for massive Reagan-era income tax cuts, but rather there is no need with a national top income tax rate of 37% and a California state income tax top bracket of 13.3%, to raise taxes even higher.

In California, 1% of households already pay almost 40% of all state income taxes—and they are leaving in the thousands. In contrast, some 30%-50% of Californians pay no state income tax.

In answer, the state now desires to tax billionaires 5% of their aggregate wealth (calibrated by all their assets) to raise an estimated $20 billion a year for five years ($100 billion). In response, already $1 trillion in assets have left California, as billionaires flee to no-tax states.

Why should a billionaire, who pays income and capital gains taxes, be forced to surrender 5% of his assets to Sacramento and what would it then be spent on? If a resident has $1 billion worth of houses, personal property, bonds, stocks, etc., and must cough up $50 million in cash to the state, in many cases he will have to sell some assets—or leave the state.

Nor does anyone think of the consequences, such as: if California can confiscate 5% of billionaires’ assets, what would stop the state from going after those worth $10 million, $5 million, or even $1 million? (Cf. Washington state’s new “millionaires’ tax” of 9.9% on income over 1 million.) And what will they do in California with the anticipated $100 billion from the billionaires—finish at least one third of the failed high-speed rail project?

Hire more investigators to try to find and prosecute those who are responsible for the current multibillion-dollar welfare fraud, and reclaim the ill-gotten funds (including the $1 billion lost to inmates, including those on death row, who defrauded the government of Covid money from their cells)?

Expand the new racial reparations fund? Build another desert solar plant like the one that is useless and being dismantled? Another billion-dollar battery storage plant at Moss Landing that periodically blows up?

Double the illegal alien MediCal health care budget? House another 30,000 illegal alien inmates in California jails and prisons?

Hire another $700,000 LA Water and Power “expert” to ensure there is no functioning reservoir above Pacific Palisades during its conflagration? Expand the travel budget for the mayor of Los Angeles?

During the Biden years, there are estimates that there were somewhere between 10 and 12 million illegal entrants. Do the math over Biden’s 1,461 days in office. If you take the higher figure, then each day of his tenure, 8,213 illegal aliens crossed into the United States.

At the lower 10 million entrant figure, some 6,844 illegal aliens daily barged across the southern border.

To get an idea of the gargantuan influx, some 12 million entrants equate to illegal aliens matching the entire population of San Francisco (840,000) every 102 days of the Biden tenure. In other words, Biden created in just four years about 14 San Franciscos of illegal aliens.

Or to put it another way, the illegal alien population that arrived from January 2021–25 was larger than the population found in some 40 individual states. Never did anyone calibrate the cost to feed, house, treat, and educate another 14 San Franciscos, much less the effect of this new pool of mostly poor, non-English speaking population on the social services accorded U.S. citizens. And certainly, no one seems to care that, without an audit, if even 5% of the influx were criminals that would translate into 600,000 criminal aliens roaming free, and often under the protective aegis of blue city/state, no-cash bail, and sanctuary-city policies.

I doubt there was a single Minnesotan, anti-ICE mom who demonstrated on behalf of any of the victims of some 600,000 criminal aliens who crossed the border—or the numbers of poor who had to deal with swamped ERs or had their dialysis treatments backlogged or could not find a doctor in need, given the needs of a sudden influx of 12 million people, many of whom had likely never seen a Western doctor.