Jonathan Berk

speaker

579 appearances 6 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 13 Aug

Jonathan Berk’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.

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Now you can do the following backly envelope calculation.

Total billionaire wealth in this state is estimated to be two trillion dollars.

And the highest tax rate in California is approximately fourteen percent.

Now, even though it is an income tax, capital gains are taxes and income tax.

Eventually, in order to consume this money, it eventually has to be realized.

So that means 14% of this wealth will eventually be collected by the state of California in income tax.

So that number is 270 billion.

So if you think about it, you're talking about just twenty percent of billionaires would have to leave the state.

If just twenty percent of billionaires left the state, the state would actually lose money on this tax.

Well, I think the motivation is that people believe that billionaires aren't paying their fair share, whatever that means.

And you know, we often have spoken about this, Jules, and I know you have strong feelings.

There's another related concept that rich people don't pay taxes.

I mean, what does the data show about that?

Half the people in the country don't pay taxes.

It's the people in the bottom fifty percent, not the top fifty percent, who don't pay taxes in this country.

You know, I like you am frustrated by this because lucky for us, I mean, luckily it wasn't our country that ran this experiment.

We've run the experiment when we said the fair share is that all the billionaire money should be paid in taxes.

That was the Soviet Union.

There were no billionaires and there was no growth.

The reason billionaires have become wealthy is because they've provided an enormous service to society.

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