California is undoubtedly solidifying its status as a deep blue hellhole, pushing a new tax policy that punishes the job-creating and investing class and those who have already left the state for better pastures. The state that can’t get a high-speed rail project completed on time and is under budget is asking for more money because Sacramento has been such a crackerjack operation when it comes to managing the state’s finances. The Golden State is just the west coast version of New Jersey—deep blue, infested with Democrats, and addicted to tax-and-spend policies. 

Just like the first one, it is antithetical to sound tax policy and economic reasoning.

You have to hand it to the leftists: They never give up. Despite the demise of President Biden’s Build Back Better plan — along with its wealth-tax proposal — the administration is back again with yet another idea for taxing wealth. They’ve just given it a new name.

President Biden is trying to pull off a neat trick with his so-called billionaire tax plan: to raise taxes on the wealthy without directly taxing wealth.

The 16th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution gives Congress “power to lay and collect taxes on incomes.” Wealth is not income, so courts have found that straight-ahead wealth taxes are unconstitutional.

In the latest Democratic effort to increase the tax bill for the super-wealthy, President Joe Biden is calling for a 20% minimum tax on multi-millionaires and billionaires in his new budget.

The “billionaire minimum income tax” is a new take on Biden’s recurring pledge to make the rich pay their “fair share.”

So much for President Biden’s pivot to the political middle. The fiscal 2023 budget he unveiled Monday re-proposes most of the bad ideas that haven’t passed Congress and adds a new one—a tax on wealth that he refused to endorse as a candidate in 2020. On the economy, he’s pivoting further left—presumably to fire up sullen progressives in November.

Joe Biden will propose a new tax on America’s richest households when he unveils his latest budget on Monday.

The Biden administration is set to propose a 20% minimum tax on households worth more than $100m. The proposal would raise more than $360bn over the next decade and “would make sure that the wealthiest Americans no longer pay a tax rate lower than teachers and firefighters”, according to a factsheet released by the White House.

An aborted Democratic plan to tax assets held by billionaires was vulnerable to attack on constitutional grounds, experts told the Washington Free Beacon.

The Constitution authorizes three forms of taxation, and tax-law gurus interviewed by the Free Beacon said the ill-fated billionaire's tax did not fit neatly in any of those categories. The measure would have taxed assets that appreciate in value year over year—like a stock or a closely held company—which aren't currently taxed until they're sold.

As congressional Democrats ironed out the details of their ambitious social spending and infrastructure package, the lawmakers considered a novel proposal for paying for it: a billionaire tax. But shortly after the idea was raised, it was axed thanks to opposition among key party members, specifically Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia.

The year 2021 has seen President Biden and congressional Democrats explore, very publicly and painfully, seemingly every possible way to squeeze more tax money out of the American people. This exploration has taken place though the federal government just enjoyed the biggest revenue haul in two decades, inflation is higher than it’s been in three decades, and Senator Kyrsten Sinema (D., Ariz.) has taken all tax-rate increases off the table.

Just over the past week, a billionaire wealth tax proposal has suddenly moved from the edge to the very center of the negotiating table for President Biden’s sweeping Build Back Better agenda.

What explains the shift? The reasons are both negative and positive.

On the negative side: Kyrsten Sinema.