What Gavin Newsom could learn from The Rolling – Latest News
California Democrats ought to hearken to The Rolling Stones.
The band famously fled England within the Nineteen Seventies, heading into tax exile within the south of France.
Mick Jagger and his mates weren’t alone — a era of rock royalty deserted the UK as a result of of its steep taxes: David Bowie opted for Switzerland; Rod Stewart went to California.
“We left England because we’d be paying 98 cents on the dollar. We left, and they lost out. No taxes at all,” Stones guitarist Keith Richards recalled to Fortune.
Progressives are now reworking California into what Britain was earlier than Margaret Thatcher — and it’s not celebrities who’re leaving, however the billionaires who drive Silicon Valley’s economic system, and subsequently the state’s.
The 2026 Billionaire Tax Act poll measure is a recipe for reverse alchemy, turning the Golden State into lead.
California’s descending into a vicious spiral all too acquainted from different blue states and cities, every time they attempt to make up for income misplaced as billionaires and companies flee by raising taxes ever increased.
But that is no atypical tax on incremental positive factors — the Billionaire Tax is straight-up confiscation, a one-time seizure of 5% of a taxpayer’s property.
The law would hit anybody with $1 billion or more, which is admittedly a tiny population even in California — fewer than 300 people.
But if hundreds of thousands of people voting in a referendum can expropriate a few hundred people this time, what’s to stop them from doing it to a few thousand the following, or many hundreds after that?
What begins with the billionaires gained’t finish with them.
Even Gov. Gavin Newsom, who’s no stranger to scaring money away from the state — simply ask Elon Musk — thinks the Billionaire Tax goes too far.
Or does he?
He tells The New York Times he fears it will hurt California’s competitiveness with different states, however a national confiscation wouldn’t be so unhealthy.
“It’s one thing to have a prism of the nation, and you can talk about 50 states,” he says. “It’s another when you’re competing against 49 other states.”
A prism of the nation?
It seems like Newsom meant “a prison of a nation” — which the prey can’t escape by simply shifting to Texas.
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Newsom has made his state a sanctuary for unlawful immigrants whereas his insurance policies encourage the nation’s most profitable businesspeople to self-deport.
The low-tax crimson states of Texas and Florida are booming thanks to precisely the other strategy — they’re sanctuaries for entrepreneurs who create new jobs and complete industries.
The tech-talent exodus had begun long earlier than the Billionaire Tax arose on California’s horizon.
But it’s hastening the push out, and whether or not or not it passes, the initiative confirms Silicon Valley’s worst fears about the place issues are headed.
So the billionaires are headed someplace else:
Elon Musk left for Texas in 2020 and subsequently relocated Tesla, SpaceX and different corporations he owns.
Peter Thiel is now a Florida resident and has shifted his operations out of California by phases.
David Sacks has gone to Austin, and Google’s founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page are mentioned to be chopping their ties to California, too.
Even the billionaire proprietor of California’s iconic In-N-Out burger chain introduced final July she was leaving for Tennessee.
A June 2025 report by the Public Policy Institute of California notes the state misplaced 1.9% of its company headquarters between 2011 and 2021.
The Los Angeles Times says California suffered a internet emigration of 741 corporations in 2022 and 531 in 2023 as effectively.
Along with New York, California is the Democratic Party’s crown jewel on the state stage.
Yet each states are bleeding business as a result of of high taxes and stifling rules.
“California and New York have, by far, the highest domestic outflow of domestic companies across the US” courting back to 2015, in accordance with the Financial Times.
These states, like different blue states and cities earlier than them, are wrecking the very prosperity that makes their in depth social providers and authorities advantages doable.
And as in Illinois and so many different locations, short-sighted unions are exacerbating California’s issues.
The Billionaire Tax is being pushed by the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West, which needs to make up for President Donald Trump’s cuts to federal providers by sapping the wealthiest Californians.
If that strikes worry into Newsom, a lot the higher — the union can use that worry to wring more concessions from him, his celebration and the state they control.
California would rank because the world’s fifth greatest economic system if it have been a nation of its own; the women and men whose talents and sources contribute essentially the most to that prosperity aren’t ready round to seek out out who’ll carve them for dinner.
They’re following the Stones’ instance and going wherever success isn’t punished.
Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review.
