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California is proposing a 5% excise tax on “billionaires”. I put it in quotes because it proposes counting everything and the kitchen sink as a dragnet to qualify as many people as possible. But what they are really doing is breaking the seal on a trend that will bankrupt the state. The inevitable outcome will be an exodus of the state’s most talented entrepreneurs who can and will choose to build their companies in less regressive states. All that will be left behind is the middle class. The tax burden, then, will fall to the middle class because after the “richest” choose to leave, the middle class are both (a) the only ones left and (b) are the largest source of state income to extract taxes from. It’s still not too late to fix California but time is running out…