Monday, April 16, 2012

Millionaire Tax

The latest from the California governor Jerry Brown:
Brown also defended calling his proposal a “millionaires tax’’ on his initiative campaign website, even though the income threshold would be $250,000.

“Anybody who makes $250,000 becomes a millionaire very quickly if you save it. You just need four years,’’ Brown said. “It is a millionaires tax. It taxes millionaires, right? And it’s for schools. And it protects public safety.’’

You know a bad argument when it has many independent planks, all trying to reel in support from various angles.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Not to mention that once you're taxed it takes more than 250k a year to become a millionaire in four years. And by taxed I also mean spend money to survive.

stephen said...

Well we now know, with probability 1, that he can divide 1m by 250k. Whats the threshold? if you make 100k it only takes 10 years of saving 100% of your income. Thats 1 MILLION DOLLARS! Clearly, they owe more.

Mercury said...

Soon to be followed by a "millionaires' flight" Jerry. Because when =>$250k/yr income earners relocate their businesses and their familes out of state, CA's share of that income drops to 0%. And if you multiply that by just four years it's also 0%.

Anonymous said...

Ha! No way anyone said something like this...come on...really...well, good thing he's not in charge of anything...oh wait....

farmland as an investment said...

Given Mr. Moonbeam's history, why are people acting all shocked now? This was eminently predictable.

Mercury said...

Oh look! Demographer Joel Kotkin details my exact point (above) in this weekend's WSJ:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304444604577340531861056966.html