Reverse envy (the idea that the top 1% should be protected from liability as if they were endangered species in a game reserve) is your problem and it's worse. It costs everyone else a fortune.

"Billion threshold would gradually hit them"? Like, a wealth tax's basement would descend to people with, say, NO WEALTH (like yourself). Uhh....

Sorry, Sir Suck-Up, but said wealthy, under the onerous burden of the highest sales taxes in America, never leave. Nor do they seem to traipse to Reno so save 8.25%, as any cursory check of high end retail in SF would attest to.

Why would they leave--they get their boots and butts cleaned for free by people like you--bon apetit!

While forgetting all the things the state and city waste money on and forgetting the terrible priorities.

Sure, some day I may need some emergency services in case of disaster or I become unemployed, I would like to get those things after paying into the system for decades. Sadly the truth of the situation is that all that money will have been burned through on idiocy long before I will likely ever see any of it.

It's tough to know. The billionaires are easy because Forbes and Fortune produce lists.

But since wealth isn't taxed, there are no annual statements made like there are with income.

And we have even less idea how much wealth CA residents have that is overseas.

But one thing is sure - we'd have a lot less of these wealthy people here if we start confiscating their wealth, particularly if other States do not. The wealthy can afford advisors who are very good at making wealth vanish, when it needs to.

I never understand the posts claiming that California has low taxes. I get it that the SFBG is an advocate for high taxes, but claiming they aren't already high is belied by the facts. This analysis, for example, indicates that we have some of the highest taxes in the nation compared to other states: http://www.taxfoundation.org/research/topic/15.html

"Estimated at 10.5% of income, California's state/local tax burden percentage stands at 6th highest nationally."

"With seven brackets and a top rate of 10.55 percent for those earning over $1,000,000. California's individual income tax has the third-highest rate and one of the most highly progressive structures in the nation. In 2008, California's state-level individual income tax collections were $1,531 per person, which ranked 4th highest nationally."

"California levies an 8.25% general sales or use tax on consumers, which is the highest in the nation and above the national median of 5.85%."

"Despite Proposition 13, California ranks in the middle of the pack when the states are ranked on combined state/local property tax collections."

I somewhat amazed at that response. It's such a denial of the most basic understandings of economics that I am amazed.

In 1979 testimony to Congress, Chavez complained, "... when the farm workers strike and their strike is successful, the employers go to Mexico and have unlimited, unrestricted use of illegal alien strikebreakers to break the strike. And, for over 30 years, the Immigration and Naturalization Service has looked the other way and assisted in the strikebreaking. I do not remember one single instance in 30 years where the Immigration service has removed strikebreakers. ... The employers use professional smugglers to recruit and transport human contraband across the Mexican border for the specific act of strikebreaking..."

How old are you?

When the tax rates went down many of the tax refuges from England moved back, there were articles in the paper about them moving back, it happened over a few years, people may have moved some place in the intervening thirty years.

After reading your posts it cracks me that you complain about FOX news bias.

do a search for, first thing that comes up.

english tax refuges rolling stones

"The 1970s was the decade of big flares, oversized collars and lumpish motors. They also became the decade when "non-domiciled" meant what it said. To pay less tax, some of Britain's richest upped sticks for less fiscally demanding surroundings.

As Britain endured economic decline and a balance of payments crisis, the shadow Chancellor, Denis Healey, may never have actually promised to tax the rich until the "pips squeak" in 1972 but a year later he did guarantee there would be "howls of anguish".
The drummer Dave Clark, whose eponymous five-piece led the charge of the British musical invasion of 1960s America was first to flee. Others followed.

The revelation of the ruinous state of the Rolling Stones' finances in the early 1970s presaged not only a move to France but perhaps their finest work: Exile on Main Street.

Michael Caine spent eight years as a tax exile and the former James Bond, Roger Moore, opted for Monaco, a des res that continues to appeal to high earners, among them the fashion tycoon Sir Philip Green, the ex-Beatle Ringo Starr and racing drivers Lewis Hamilton and David Coulthard.

Switzerland, tax haven of the drummer Phil Collins, remains an equally popular redoubt.

"People who are UK based have always been able to get out of tax by simply leaving the country. You will find pop stars and film stars throughout the system," explained Mike Warburton, the senior tax partner at Grant Thornton.

"But what reversed the so-called brain drain of the late Seventies was the arrival of the Thatcher government in 1979," he said.

Today, more than 10 years after the election of Tony Blair, tax paid on income and investment earnings is capped at 40 per cent, the non-doms have arrived in force and the City has surfed the stock market wave. But then Alistair Darling intervened. Forty years after Mr Healey, a 1970s debate about tax is reignited. Someone should ask DCI Gene Hunt for his views.