California: taxing people who aren’t there

As the old aphorism goes: “Don’t tax you; don’t tax me. Tax that fellow behind the tree.” Nobody likes paying taxes, but most Americans accept them as a necessary evil and are willing to pay their fair share, unless politicians waste those tax dollars in extraordinarily—well—wasteful ways, or steal them outright.

I refer, of course, to California, where, as the classic Eagle’s song Hotel California goes: “You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.”

California, it’s no secret, is in deep financial trouble. In 2022, Gavin Newsom bragged about a $97.5 billion dollar surplus. By the 2024-25 budget, that surplus turned into an estimated $73 billion deficit. By the end of 2025, it’s likely far worse and virtually no one trusts state government’s estimates.

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A substantial part of the problem has been grotesque government overspending and fraud that reportedly makes Minnesota’s fraud totals look like couch cushion change. Newsom’s high-speed-rail-to-nowhere debacle hasn’t helped. And worse, Americans get to vote with their feet and U-Hauls. California is losing a taxpayer every one minute and 44 seconds of every day. This includes billionaires, of which California used to have a reasonably large supply.

What to do; what to do? Newsom and the one-party Democrat legislature know: retroactively tax fleeing billionaires!

California Democrats are pushing the retroactive billionaire tax targeting the roughly 220 billionaires residing in California in 2025. It signals not just desperation in the face of crippling debt and overspending but a recognition that California is chasing its highest earners out of the state.

The “2026 Billionaires Tax Act” would impose a one-time 5% tax on individual wealth exceeding $1 billion. While technically using 2026 wealth figures, it would apply to billionaires who resided in California in 2025. So you cannot hope to flee… at least with your wealth intact. It is a penalty for those who stayed too long hoping that rational minds would prevail in California.

Democrats have long whined that the rich weren’t “paying their fair share.” Make the rich pay what they owe and our budget problems, state and federal, will disappear, they claim. It’s a topic Bill Whittle addressed in a classic video titled: “Eat the Rich!” Whittle, step by step, explored taking all the assets of the wealthy to fund one year of the federal government, and by that mechanism barely manages to do it, but points out that money covered—barely—a single year. All the assets of the wealthy are gone, every penny. From where—who—will the money to cover next year’s bills come? A one-time billionaire tax suddenly becomes eternal.

Californians can be certain if California gets away with a retroactive tax on billionaires, they’ll surely extend it to millionaires and then everyone else, and so will other blue states. But how does that work? How can a state tax people who don’t live there any more?

George Washington Law Professor Jonathan Turley explains:

The constitutionality of a retroactive tax has long been controversial. In Landgraf v. USI Film Products (1994), the Supreme Court declared “the presumption against retroactive legislation is deeply rooted in our jurisprudence… [e]lementary considerations of fairness dictate that individuals should have an opportunity to know what the law is and conform their conduct accordingly; settled expectations should not be lightly disrupted.”

Turley goes on to note several other Supreme Court decisions coming down on both sides of a bright line. And at Legal Insurrection, Mary Chastain notes that presidential candidate Gavin Newsom may have had a change of heart:

Dan Newman, a political adviser opposing the campaign to tax billionaires, said Newsom is against a plan to slap a one-time, 5% tax on roughly 200 Californians worth more than $1 billion to “replace lost federal dollars and protect essential services,” as described by the campaign’s website.

That’s a tough one for Newsom. On one hand the financial disaster he’s made of California is likely to figuratively kill him in a presidential race. On the other, if he does decide to run, and he wouldn’t lie about a thing like whether or not he’s already made that decision, he’s going to need every billionaire buck he can find. Fleecing them after they’ve fled the state isn’t going to fill his campaign coffers.

Maybe Newsom won’t get the chance to do to America what he’s done to California after all—but he just might.

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Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, life-long athlete, firearm instructor, retired police officer and high school and college English teacher. He is a published author and blogger. His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor.