Matt Mahan

you have paper wealth of $100 million.

It could disappear tomorrow.

The company could be one mistake, one competitor away from losing all of its value, but you 10X the calculation.

So now theoretically for purposes of the wealth tax, you should be assessed at a billion dollars.

You're then forced to come up with 5% of that or 50 million.

There may not even be a market

for your shares, and if you try to go dump all of those shares on the market, the value's gonna plummet, and suddenly your company's worth nothing.

So it just, I mean, this is why you've already seen, just with the proposal of this wealth tax, you've seen over a trillion dollars of capital flight from the state of California,

There are estimates, independent estimates.

It was just, I'm forgetting his name now, but a researcher who spoke at Stanford the other day estimated that the net impact of this may be up to $25 billion per year in lower revenue.

The tax when first proposed was estimated at the high end to generate $100 billion once.

This could reduce ongoing annual revenue for the state by up to $25 billion.

And if we lose the companies of the future, the big growth drivers and employment drivers of the state, it could actually be much worse than that in the long run.

The accountants have been very busy creating new landing places for people, not just billionaires, but wealthier folks, business owners all over the country.

They're creating primary residences in other places.

And we're very vulnerable to capital flight because so much of our revenue comes from our top income earners.

So I worry that in practice, and again, it may be the best intended proposal, I do think wealth inequality is a problem.

I think an even bigger problem is people don't feel they can achieve the American dream and that they have the opportunity for real upward mobility.

But this proposal is incredibly likely to backfire, which is why I've opposed it and I'm really concerned about it.

Not necessarily.