►搬走也沒用? 藍州「離境稅」陰魂不散 ◄中英對照|即時新聞|學習道地口語表達

A growing number of blue states are exploring an exit tax or wealth tax in order to combat revenue losses from residents fleeing to lower tax areas. At least 10 have recently explored proposals, including California, Michigan, and Washington State. The National News Desk, Jeff Harris, joining us, and we know it's not just notable high net worth people, Jeff, that are leaving these tax states, but also businesses like Chevron and Uber. So major corporations, financial firms, and also people continue to relocate their headquarters or operations from high tax states like California and New York to more business friendly areas like Texas and Florida. The move's coming as more blue states explore these wealth and also exit taxes. Across the country, at least 10 states are now exploring or have already passed an exit or wealth tax in order to combat revenue losses from residents fleeing to lower tax areas. That includes California, New York, and Michigan. You tally up the value of your home, your cars, your furniture, your assets, your stocks, your bonds, your art, and there is a tax on that value. Sandra Swarski, founder of Integer, a government relations and advocacy firm, tells the National News Desk, among the most prominent, California's proposed Billionaire Tax Act, which would impose a one-time 5% tax on the total net worth of anyone worth over $1 billion living in the state, impacting at least 200 people. The value of these assets, of your net worth, in some cases is very easy to calculate, stocks and bonds and the like. In other cases, it's really difficult to calculate. Also Washington State, who just passed a 9.9% tax on incomes over $1 million. The bill's passage coming around the same time, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, who has an estimated net worth of over $3 billion, announced his move to Florida. Not just move himself down to Florida, but he's moving his entire company, Starbucks, out of the state of Washington. That's huge. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon taking a swing at New York City officials this week, saying high taxes are causing a surge of businesses to leave the Big Apple. The truth is that while New York City has much going for, particularly for financial companies, it also has the highest city and state corporate taxes and the highest individual income and state taxes, thoughts Dimon echoed about a week ago. All you have to do is look at California versus Nevada, New York versus Florida, and there's a huge exodus taking place. Meanwhile, New York Governor Kathy Hochul acknowledging that the state's tax base has been heavily impacted by an exodus to low tax states, urging wealthier residents to come back. Now, according to the most recent IRS service data from 2022 to 2023, due to migration from blue to red states, California lost just under $12 billion in New York, $9.9 billion, while Florida gained $20.5 billion in Texas, $5.5 billion. Our research are also finding a massive population shift with data showing from 2024 to 2025, California lost nearly 230,000 residents. So if you thought moving might solve your blue state high tax problem, it actually might not be as easy as you thought. At least 10 states are now floating the idea of an exit tax, not just taxing you to death while you live there, but they're going to tax you with a knife in your back when you leave too. That is right. California, New York, Washington, and Michigan, all looking for ways to hit high earners with a final bill just for moving out. Talk about letting the door hit you on the way out. I mean, this is worse than a divorce, Marcus. This is like the lover's leaving and you've got to pay. Am I going to have to pay to leave you? Leave right now. I do. One of the things that I want to get to with you before we finish this discussion is the legality of this. How they would even pull this off. But from a principal standpoint, the thing that bothered me the most in the research was the ability or the idea that states would have the ability to reach into the past to go and say, for the last five years, I'm going to look at everything and I'm going to take it all. I can't imagine that anybody would think this is a good idea. I can't imagine, but it sounds like people think it is. People think it's a good idea. Why? Some people do. This is the thing. In the blue states, the leadership that you have, Jerry, wants to see life in America look different. They don't want to see capitalism thrive. They don't want to see our system as we know it. We talk about this with the degradation of California, for example, and how things are changing there, but nobody changes the policies. And so there's a very easy way to fix this. It would be to change your policies, but they refuse to do that. So until leadership changes, these are the kinds of ideas that are going to become mainstream in blue states. Whether they're legal or not, Marcus, or they're able to enact them or not is a separate question. But this is how, essentially, socialist leadership thinks. Everybody should be equal. We all should have the same amount of money, the same number of houses, the same everything. That's the way they think about it. I want to talk about an unintended consequence of one of these laws that's been proposed, and that's the billionaire tax in California. So work this out in your head, because I think the people proposing it have not done so. So they want to put a 5% tax one time on the total net worth of anyone making more than a billion dollars, worth more than a billion dollars. In any asset class. And think about how this would work. So you own a business that has $100 billion paper valuation. You have maybe $2 million in liquid assets. This comes down. You have to sell that business to pay the tax. This is the kind of unintended consequence that people never think about when they're talking policy, when they're trying to make a grab of wealth assets. Not to mention, though, your paper wealth could change and fluctuate. This is like when we talk about taxing unrealized capital gains. Bingo. That's exactly where I want to go. The good news is, this is so absurd and no one has thought through the unintended consequences, I don't think this has a chance of going through. Because I'm worth a million or a billion, depending on your M or your B of the day. And let's say it's all because I own Bitcoin or a piece of art. What happens if that falls below a million or a billion? Do I then get a refund? They don't know. That's not it. So legality. I don't think any of this works because you can't. It's the unrealized capital gains. You want to tax me on my paper, but if the paper amount goes down the next day, I don't get a refund. And also, are we marked to market at the end of December 31? June 1? What day? What time? Nobody knows what day you mark your asset on your book. It's so absurd, I don't think it goes through with the good news. They're so desperate that they don't care. Kathy Hochul, governor of New York, has come out and said, we have lost so much population. We have lost so much money to states like Florida and Tennessee that we have to do something. I have a really good friend, makes a lot of money. He's a diehard New Yorker, owns a business in New York, and before Mamdani was elected, he moved. He might not even win. What are you doing? You love it here. He said, if this city is even thinking about something like this, I cannot be here. So he sold his apartment, penthouse, he's trying to sell his business, and he moved across the river. OK, he's in New Jersey. It's not much better, but he was done. Because the message New York was sending was, this is not how we want to treat you and your money. And that's what many of these other governors have done. They know this is the repercussions of what they're saying and what they're doing, but they're doing it anyway because they're desperate. It's a class war that's going on right now, I think. And did anybody read the story in the Wall Street Journal this week that showed that the number of Americans who are entering the upper middle class is growing and growing dramatically? The number of people you would think of as poor is shrinking over time. And it is getting better out there, not worse. Let's eliminate all the philosophical fury that all of us have and just get practical. And Jerry, you said if there was a company that had a billion dollar market cap or two billion dollar market cap, and the founder of that business possessed a billion dollars of that, the minute that founder is forced to sell, the market cap of that company is going to dramatically change and affect every holder in that. So now when I think about buying stocks, if I know that company's based in a state and I know that founder's based in a state and this tax is going to happen, I should assume there's going to be liquidity all of a sudden, pressure, selling pressure coming into the market. Do I want to own that stock? This reminds me of the unintended consequences of when Tim Walz said, I hate Tesla. Everyone sell Tesla stock, not understanding that his state's pension fund to pay for teachers and firefighters was a holder in Tesla. Or maybe partially understanding and just not caring. Because when I think about the kind of market destruction that you're talking about, I sort of see this like California, why do they keep going down that road when they know that they're destroying their own state? Because they want to, because they want to see state run everything, because they don't want to see private enterprise. I'm not talking about five years from now or 10 years from now, but I'm talking about the extreme progressives vision of America and how we fit into a globalist society that doesn't have that kind of private wealth. Had any efficiencies whatsoever and was capable of running its business. Maybe I would even think about it, but all of the evidence is to the contrary. All of the, it seems like so much of American taxpayer money is stolen, abused, misused. So you want me to give money to an entity that can't even spend it well. Right. All right. We'll leave it there. If you enjoy this content, please consider subscribing to my channel to stay up to date with future videos. Thank you for watching.