As a reminder, Mitt Romney was right when he said (and later apologized for saying) that about 47% of working americans pay no income taxes.

The fundamental issue is that this is a wealth tax, not an income tax. They want to tax what your founder shares are worth now, not tax you on the proceeds when you actually sell them in the future.

How long before CA imposes a "wealth tax" on the increased value of your home, the current market value of your investment portfolio?

As a reminder, the VA redistricting measure looks to be unconstitutional in part because the description on the ballot initiative said the purpose was to "restore fairness", a very biasing statement. I suspect CA might run against a similar issue if they refer to this in a similar way (restore "fairness")...

As a reminder, this is VERY SIMILAR to how the US Income Tax got started - briefly, at the turn of the last century (1900) there was no federal income tax, then it was decided that the "uber rich" weren't paying their "fair share", so they implemented a tax only on the truely richest of the rich, and just a few percent, nothing too egregious (you know, the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, the DuPonts, etc). Well, fast forward 20 years or so, and the Income Tax had dropped down to be a concern for "average" Americans, not just the Robber Barons.

As a reminder, this is a wealth tax, not an income tax - many that have to pay this wealth tax will be forced to sell stocks to make the payment, which will likely drop the stock process for everyone holding the stocks.

Once politicians discover they can get 99.99% of voters to tax the 0.01% of residents, what will stop them from sliding the scale down to getting 51% of state residents to vote to tax the other 49%?

Why does anyone believe this will truly be a "one-time" event?

This tax, as written will never affect me (not a billionaire, not a California resident), but this is a bad idea, a really bad idea, that will not go the way the politicians say it will - think about it, the state thinks it can just "pull" $500BN (a half-trillion dollars!) out of the CA economy to pay for what sounds like good things, but the need will outlast the available funds, so it will inevitably be repeated...

But hey, go for it California - after the SF-LA bullet train, the billions to "end homelessness", the billions to "fix the aqueduct system" and other CA boondoggles, what's another $500BN from the 218 folks that can easily afford to move out of state, and take their companies and their workers with them?

As a reminder, Gov Newsome is opposed to this tax.

Should be fun to watch.

Reminds me of the NJ billionaire that moved out of state after the state targeted him with a special tax years ago - the billionaire moved himself and his company, and NJ lost so much tax revenue the state had to re-balance the budget to account for the $200M that one man/company paid in taxes.

It would be very, very helpful if the folks behind this effort would step forward and just declare what the "rich" need to pay to be their "Fair Share" - they always want more, but never say what a "Fair Share" is...

We put a man on the moon, then Jimmy Carter created the federal department of education, and nationwide standardized test scores have been in decline ever since, while per-pupil spend has gone up faster than inflation.

A few years ago Baltimore had 13 high schools that had NO students reading or doing math at grade level, yet, each year those 13 high school's graduating classes had "Valedictorians" who could not read or do math at grade level.

Let that sink in.

Baltimore is not a Republican-controlled city, Baltimore is not a poor community, but Baltimore has/had a failing school system.

If any additional money is funneled into the Baltimore school system, do you think it goes to fixing infrastructure, expanding the curriculum, or increasing teacher salaries, pensions, and health care benefits?

This would be like Walmart opening a supercenter in a town and deciding to pay a "commission" on every grocery sale to the previously-existing grocery store in town on every grocery sale, and a commission to the local clothing stores for every item of clothing sold in the Walmart clothing section, etc...

It doesn't bring new business/customers to local book stores, it is an Amazon competitor that is paying "indulgences" to local book stores as it does *exactly* what Amazon does and takes away sales from local book stores.

This story has NOTHING to do with local stores selling more books, this is an online competitor that lists, stocks, processes, and ships books from their own facility, but allows customers to identify a local book store they might have bought the book from, which will get a small "commission" (my word) for a book sale the local book store was never a part of.

Amazon offers "Affiliate Marketing" where users can suggest and link to an Amazon product and get a small commission for every click-thru that results in an order.

This program, bookshop.org, is very much like that, but the local bookstores don't have to go thru the bother of linking to the product on Amazon, instead the buyer can select a local business that they want to send a percantage of bookshop.com's profits to.

I could open a book store, register it with bookshop.org, and start collecting payments from book sales online that never touched my store.

This is charity, trying to white-wash an Amazon competitior's business by paying-off local book shops for sales the local book shops were not part of the transaction.

Amazon doesn't sell used books - Amazon hosts used book sellers on it's platform, and the sellers set the prices. Your beef is with the sellers, not Amazon. Now, maybe Amazon is over-charging for the referral/processing/shipping services the used book sellers rely on, and that drives up prices, but thats a choice the used books sellers make...

What?

As best as I can deduce, what they do is compete, directly, with Amazon as a single, large, online book store shipping books they stock to customers that visit their site. Customer's can choose to "identify" a local book store they want to "sponsor" (my word), and the large vendor "bookshop.org" will literally give the local bookstore money as a "commission" (again, my word) on book sales they local book store was never involved in. If a customer doesn't pick a local bookstore to "sponsor", a share of the profits from the book sale from "bookshop.org" go into a pool that is divided among all registered book sellers.

In other words, bookshop.org is giving free money to local bookstores as comissions on book sales the local bookstore was never involved in.

It really isn't very surprising that bookshop.org has signed up lots of book stores - why wouldn't they? For *zero* added work they get free money from bookshop.org!

I was hoping that bookshop.org was acting as a broker, forwarding online book orders to be sold, processed, and shipped from local book stores that would in-turn give bookshop.org a small referral commission - but that is not the case.

Companies bought IBM PCs and XTs in jaw-dropping numbers while Home PC sold like "hotcakes" in the mid-80s.

I was watching a video last night, Radio Shack sold a quarter million TRS-80 Model Ones in the late 70s, by the time we got into the 80s home computers were all the rage from Apple, Atari, Commodore, and others (typically cheap clones of some of the more popular home computers), and thee were countless businesses/doctors offices, etc that were running their worlds on CP/M systems.

I wonder if it was a "sad product placement...failure" or if it was simply a prop rented from a prop house to dress a set? Based on the number of times I've seen one of these in a movie or TV show I'm convinced they were owned by a studio or private prop house - when a company does a product placement they typically make sure the company logo is plainly visable. (Ever notice the strange places (wired) AT&T phones had logos on them when the camera pulls in on someone talking on a phone? Typically there's an AT&T logo right next to the mic opening on the handset?) When I see a UnixPC in the background for a moview/tv show, they *never* have a visable logo, a key element of any product placement/branding effort...

Unix on 68000-based "servers" (not Sun, et al, but no-name 68000 boxes, more like an S100 bus system than, say, a Sun server) was a thing back in the late 1980s, I remember my small college in central PA had one that ran a dozen or so serial terminals for CS students to develop code on at the time.

The job benefit is construction, so short-lived, the long term benefits is to the local tax base.

A successful data center pays a lot more in taxes than an abandoned off-line paper mill...

And generate tax revenue - that is the appeal. Not income taxes on worker salaries, but on the income generated by the data center itself - corporate income taxes and property taxes.

Local utilities expand to serve expanding residential developments, the home builder doesn't need to build their own power plant or water treatment plant...