Revenue Sources to Tap

Responding to: California’s wealthy are trading the Golden State for the Golden Nugget · 2026-06-26

Primary Talking Point

The piece’s single primary power-protecting talking point, verbatim from the source:

“Many residents feel like California’s government sees successful taxpayers not as citizens to attract, but as revenue sources to tap.”

This is the framing’s load-bearing sentence: it converts a request for billionaires to pay for the public commons that produced their wealth into a narrative of persecution, and asks the median Californian to identify with the wealth class’s grievance against the state.

What the Piece Argues

Ted Jenkin, president of a firm called “Exit Stage Left Advisors” that helps wealthy clients relocate, argues that California’s tax environment is driving successful entrepreneurs and investors out of the state to Nevada. He frames the proposed November 2026 ballot measure — a one-time 5% tax on billionaires’ covered assets over $1 billion — as the latest in a pattern of escalating taxation that treats successful taxpayers as “revenue sources to tap” rather than citizens to attract. The piece presents billionaire flight as the rational response to “staggering” tax differences (California’s 13.3% top rate vs. Nevada’s zero) and warns that the wealth tax will inevitably spread from billionaires to multimillionaires to the middle class.

Receipts

The piece is a sales pitch for the author himself, dressed in op-ed clothing, asking the median Californian to identify with the wealth class’s exit.

• The framing wants you to believe: Wealthy residents are being “bled” by California and “fleeing” to low-tax states; the billionaire wealth tax is a “staggering” escalation that will inevitably spread from billionaires to multimillionaires to the middle class, mirroring the federal income tax’s historical expansion; “successful entrepreneurs and investors” are the people who built California and should be courted, not taxed.

• What’s really going on: The author runs Exit Stage Left Advisors, a firm whose business model is facilitating exactly this migration — the op-ed is, in operational fact, an advertisement for his services. The billionaires the proposal targets accumulated their wealth on a substrate of California-built infrastructure, public-funded research, public education, and court-enforced contracts, and the proposal asks them to pay for the maintenance of the substrate that produced their wealth. The “tax-flight” framing is empirically thin: academic research on millionaire migration consistently finds tax-driven out-migration is small, often temporary, and concentrated in retirees whose move was already planned [Cristobal Young, “Millionaire Migration and Taxation of the Elite,” American Sociological Review (2016); The Myth of Millionaire Tax Flight, Stanford University Press, 2017]. The real victims of the framing are the working- and middle-class Californians who would bear the cost of defunded schools, hospitals, transit, and emergency services.

The DEFCON Ladder

DEFCON 5 — Polite Reframe

When to use: A good-faith friend or family member who repeats the “California is losing its wealthy” frame as economic common sense.

A high school teacher in Oakland has been doing her work for 22 years. Her students graduate, go on to college, build companies, and some become the very billionaires whose names appear on the Forbes list. They use the airports her taxes help maintain, hire the workers her taxes helped educate, sell in the markets her regulators keep honest, and sue in the courts her taxes fund. And when California asks them to pay a wealth tax on the billions they accumulated, the op-ed class tells her she is being aggressive.

The piece is written by Ted Jenkin, president of Exit Stage Left Advisors — a firm whose business model is facilitating exactly the migration the column is endorsing. The column is, in operational fact, a sales pitch for his services.

California’s proposed ballot measure is a one-time 5% tax on billionaire wealth over $1 billion, projected to generate roughly $100 billion between 2027 and 2031 for California schools and health services [ITEP expert report on the California 2026 Billionaire Tax]. The migration story the column sells is thinner than it allows: year after year, the documented out-migration of California millionaires is small, often temporary, and concentrated in retirees whose move was already planned. The U-Hauls the column invokes are real, but most belong to working-class families leaving for housing markets that were bid up by speculative capital. The very policy the column recommends is part of the pressure pushing those families out.

There is a fair debate to have about whether the wealth tax is the right instrument. The honest version of that debate is technical — rate, bracket, design, revenue allocation. The column is not having that debate. It is having the debate about whether billionaires should pay for what built them at all.

DEFCON 4 — Firm Moral Superiority

When to use: A confident op-ed reader who treats the billionaire-tax question as a “freedom vs. coercion” binary.

The column’s central prediction is the one to take seriously, because the prediction is doing most of the work. Ted Jenkin writes that “tax policies rarely stay confined to their original targets” and that federal income taxes “once applied to only a tiny fraction of Americans” before expanding. The argument is that the proposed billionaire wealth tax will inevitably extend to multimillionaires, then the middle class, then everyone. This is the column’s load-bearing claim, and it deserves examination on the merits.

It is the slippery-slope argument, named by the logician Douglas Walton — and like most slippery-slope arguments, it works only if you do not examine the intermediate links. The federal income tax’s expansion across the twentieth century was driven by world wars, by the Sixteenth Amendment’s adoption, and by repeated legislative decisions over decades. The California proposal is structurally different: it is a one-time 5% tax on a defined bracket, projected to generate roughly $100 billion over five years for health and education. The slope the column is warning you about is not a natural feature of wealth taxes. It is a feature of wealth taxes that have not been deliberately designed to resist expansion — which is a problem of design, not of category.

The deeper issue is the moral inversion at the column’s core. The billionaires the proposal targets did not build California alone. They built it on a foundation of public investment — schools, universities, public research, courts, transit, water systems, electrical grids, the patent system. The column treats their wealth as a private accomplishment and their tax bill as a confiscation. The empirical record is the opposite. A substantial share of billionaire wealth in California traces directly to public investment that created the preconditions for the wealth to exist. The federal research pipeline that became the internet. The public university research that became biotech. The community college system that produced the workforce. The courts that enforce the contracts. These are the public substrate.

When the column warns that billionaires are treated as “revenue sources to tap” rather than “citizens to attract,” it is asking you to invert the actual structure. The billionaires are not being asked to subsidize strangers. They are being asked to pay for the substrate that produced their wealth. The framing that calls this persecution is a framing that wants the substrate’s bill paid by the rest of us. The “freedom” the column is defending is the freedom of the wealthiest residents to extract from a public commons and refuse to pay for maintaining it.

This is the part where the column needs to answer for itself. The author runs a firm called Exit Stage Left Advisors whose entire business is facilitating this exact migration. The column is, in significant part, an advertisement for his services. The “freedom” he is defending is the freedom to leave the moment the public asks for its money back.

There is a fair debate to have about the design of the wealth tax. The honest version is technical. The column is not having that debate. It is having the debate about whether billionaires should pay for what built them at all. That is not a debate about tax design. It is a debate about whether the public commons that produced billionaire wealth has any claim on the wealth it produced.

The column is asking for a California that does not ask billionaires to pay for the things that built them. The honest answer to that ask is the ask itself: no.

DEFCON 3 — Mockery and Ridicule

When to use: The Thanksgiving table that needs the conversation broken open; a Twitter reply that needs to perform for the bystander.

The billionaire-flee-broker industry has produced its most honest advertisement yet. Ted Jenkin, who runs a firm literally called Exit Stage Left Advisors, has published an op-ed explaining that billionaires are fleeing California because they are being aggressively taxed. The op-ed is, in operational fact, a sales pitch for his own services. The man who profits from the migration is the man telling you the migration is the only moral response.

Let that sit. The column’s central claim is that billionaires are victims of California’s “aggressive tax environment” and that leaving for Nevada is the only rational response. The op-ed’s author built a business around the proposition that this is what billionaires should do. The author is the supplier; the column is the product literature. The column is not analyzing the migration. The column is producing it.

Consider what the proposed wealth tax would actually do. The ballot measure is a one-time 5% tax on billionaire wealth over $1 billion, projected to generate roughly $100 billion over five years, with 90% dedicated to a Billionaire Tax Health Account and 10% to a Billionaire Tax Education and Food Assistance Account. That is a number that could fund the entire UC and CSU system, build a working high-speed rail line, or house every unhoused veteran in the state. The column’s proposal is to let the few walk away and have the other 39 million pick up the bill.

The literalized image is this. Ted Jenkin, the Exit Stage Left broker, is standing at the door telling the billionaires to get in the U-Haul. California high school teachers are standing behind him asking who is going to fix the roof. The column’s answer is that the teachers should be more attractive to the billionaires. The column is not serious. It is a paid political advertisement for the tax-fleeing industry dressed in op-ed clothing.

The billionaires in question are not the “small business owners” the framing wants you to imagine. They are individuals whose net worth exceeds the GDP of small nations, who, on some measures, pay effective federal tax rates at or below those of their secretaries, and who are now threatening to move to Nevada because the state that built them wants them to chip in for the schools and roads that built them. The framing of these individuals as “successful entrepreneurs” being persecuted by aggressive taxation is not analysis. It is flattery of the customer base of Exit Stage Left Advisors.

The column is an ad for a tax-fleeing service pretending to be a public-policy argument. The billboard for that service is on the op-ed page this week. If you are a billionaire considering whether to flee California, the column is the brochure. If you are anyone else, the column is the brochure trying to convince you to convince the billionaires to flee.

The billionaires in question are not being persecuted. They are being asked to pay rent. They are threatening to move out rather than pay. The man who gets paid to help them move is the man telling you that moving is the moral thing to do.

DEFCON 2 — Aggressive Villainization

When to use: When the speaker is a named op-ed author or billionaire tax-fighter and the conversation has moved past the polite stage.

Ted Jenkin, president of Exit Stage Left Advisors, wants you to know that California’s billionaire tax is “aggressive,” that billionaires are being “bled,” and that the migration of the wealthy to Nevada is the rational response of “successful entrepreneurs and investors” who have been mistreated by their own state. The column is presented as a defense of Californians from overreach. Read it for what it is: a defense of billionaire wealth from democracy.

The billionaires the column is defending are not the small-business owners the word “entrepreneur” conjures. They are the small population of individuals whose net worth places them on the Forbes list — individuals whose wealth was, in documented cases, built on public investment, public infrastructure, public research, public education, public courts, and a public securities-trading system that the SEC enforces at public expense. The column wants you to call these individuals “successful taxpayers.” A more accurate name is “tax-feeders”: residents who feed at the public trough, who use the public commons to generate private wealth, and who, when asked to pay the bill for the commons, declare themselves persecuted and announce their departure.

The institutional authorship of the framing is plain. The column runs on Fox News Opinion, a publication whose tax and economic coverage has tracked, for forty years, with the editorial priorities of the donor-class network that funds it. The piece is written by the president of a firm whose business model is the exact migration the column is advocating. The column is a sales channel disguised as analysis. The “freedom” it is defending is the freedom of the most wealthy residents to refuse to pay for the public substrate that produced their wealth. The “victims” it names are the individuals who would, if the tax passed, become the first American wealth-class to be asked to contribute to the maintenance of the public commons at a rate proportional to their extraction from it.

The mirror the column does not want you to look into is the one it sets up itself. The column warns that “tax policies rarely stay confined to their original targets” and invokes the federal income tax’s historical expansion. The structural inversion is this: the federal income tax expanded because the alternative was a wealth aristocracy that paid nothing while the working class funded the world wars, the interstates, the public university system, and the G.I. Bill that built the post-war middle class. The column wants you to read the income tax’s expansion as cautionary. A more accurate reading is that the income tax expanded because the alternative — a class of permanent wealth-holders paying nothing while everyone else paid — was incompatible with a functioning republic. The wealth tax is the same argument, at the level the income tax was always trying to reach. The column wants you to call this a slippery slope. A more accurate name is the original slope: a class that pays nothing while the rest pays for everything is not a feature of a healthy economy. It is a symptom that something has failed.

The billionaires the column is defending are not being persecuted. They are being asked to pay rent. The column is defending their right to live in a public-subsidized penthouse while the public subsidy is held to ransom by the threat of departure. The column is not a policy argument. It is a hostage negotiation dressed as a policy argument, and the hostage is the California middle class.

This is what the framing is asking for. It is asking you to identify with the billionaires who are threatening to leave. It is asking you to defend their right to a lower tax bill than yours. It is asking you to call the proposal to tax them “aggressive.” The framing is asking you to betray your own class interest because the wealth class has produced a more articulate op-ed.

The billionaires in question are the people whose exit the column is trying to choreograph. Ted Jenkin is the choreographer. The column is the program. Read it that way and the piece is exactly what it has always been: a sales pitch from the man who gets paid to help the rich run, asking you to convince yourself the running is the moral thing to do.

DEFCON 1 — Nuclear Satire

When to use: When the indictment needs the full grotesque metaphor and the audience can take the cathartic release.

The wealth-hoarding industry has produced its own house organ, and this week the house organ is bleeding ink. Ted Jenkin, the man whose company is named after the direction his customers are encouraged to walk, has published a column on the public-policy page of a major American outlet explaining that billionaires are the victims of California’s “aggressive tax environment,” and that the rational response is to load the U-Haul and head for Nevada. The column is not an analysis. It is a brochure. The cover price is your agreement that billionaires who refuse to pay for the public infrastructure that made their billions are being mistreated. The product is your vote.

Let us take the brochure at its word. California’s proposed wealth tax would apply to a small population of billionaires — individuals whose net worth places them in a category of human being that, by some cosmic clerical error, is allowed to vote in the same elections as the people whose labor made the wealth possible. The ballot measure is a one-time 5% tax on assets over $1 billion, projected to generate roughly $100 billion between 2027 and 2031 for California schools and health services. The proposal is, in the brochure’s own telling, “staggering.” The author is right. The proposal is staggering in the way a 1% mortgage payment is staggering to a person making minimum wage. It is staggering because the underlying wealth is staggering, and a small tax on a staggering number is still a number most Californians will never see in their lifetimes.

The brochure warns that “tax policies rarely stay confined to their original targets” and that the wealth tax will spread to multimillionaires, then to the middle class. This is the brochure’s centerpiece — a prediction of a future in which the wealthy are repeatedly asked to chip in for the things the wealthy keep taking. The brochure would like you to find this prediction alarming. The brochure is hoping you do not notice that the prediction is indistinguishable from the basic operation of a functioning republic.

The brochure invokes the federal income tax’s historical expansion as evidence for its prediction. The brochure is doing what brochures do — it is omitting the part of the story that indicts the brochure. The federal income tax expanded because the alternative was a permanent wealth aristocracy that paid nothing and the public paid for everything. The wealth tax the brochure is attacking is the same argument, at the level the income tax was always trying to reach. The brochure wants you to call this a slippery slope. A more accurate name is the original slope: a class of permanent wealth-holders paying nothing while the working class funds the wars, the roads, the courts, the universities, the G.I. Bill, and the G.I. Bill’s mortgage guarantees that built the post-war middle class — the very middle class the brochure is now telling you to ask to pay even less.

Let us name the brochure’s subject. The “successful entrepreneurs and investors” the brochure is defending are individuals whose net worth exceeds the gross domestic product of small nations, who, on some measures, pay effective federal tax rates at or below those of their secretaries, who, in documented cases, have spent recent years engineering stock buybacks to inflate their personal net worth while their companies’ employees worked through a pandemic on hazard pay, and who are now threatening to move to Nevada because the state that built them wants them to chip in for the schools and roads that built them. The brochure calls this persecution. A more accurate name is rent-avoidance by residents whose wealth was built on subsidized housing.

The brochure’s institutional authorship is its tell. The brochure runs on Fox News Opinion, a publication whose tax and economic coverage has tracked with the editorial priorities of a donor network whose foundations, op-ed pages, think tanks, and state-level policy shops have spent forty years producing the exact framing the brochure is selling. The brochure is written by the president of a firm whose name is the operation the brochure is performing. The brochure is not a policy argument. It is a sales channel disguised as a policy argument, and the product is your agreement that the rich should not pay for what built them.

The brochure’s only structural claim is that billionaires will leave if taxed. The brochure offers no evidence beyond anecdote. The brochure does not engage the academic literature on millionaire migration, which finds documented out-migration small, often temporary, and concentrated in retirees whose move was already planned. The brochure does not engage the IRS Statistics of Income data showing that the wealthy in California already move frequently and that tax-driven migration is a fraction of total migration. The brochure does not engage the empirical finding that when states raise taxes on the wealthy, the wealthy do not leave at rates that meaningfully reduce revenue. The brochure substitutes U-Haul reservations for the empirical record. The brochure is hoping you do not check.

Let us name what the brochure is. The brochure is a ransom note. The hostage is the California middle class. The kidnapper is the wealth class, threatening departure unless the state backs down. The broker is the man whose company is named after the operation he is performing. The op-ed page is the venue. The brochure is a hostage negotiation staged as a public-policy argument.

The op-ed is asking you to identify with the kidnapper. The op-ed is asking you to defend the kidnapper’s right to a lower ransom than the hostage. The op-ed is asking you to call the hostage negotiation “freedom.” The op-ed is asking you to betray your own class interest because the kidnapper has produced a more articulate brochure.

Ted Jenkin is not a public-policy analyst. Ted Jenkin is a man whose company gets paid to help billionaires move. Ted Jenkin has produced an op-ed in which he performs the function his company sells. The op-ed is not in any meaningful sense an analysis. The op-ed is a sales pitch for Exit Stage Left Advisors, published on the op-ed page of a major American outlet, paid for by the columnists’ salaries, and asking you to read the sales pitch as a defense of your own interest.

The billionaires in question are not being persecuted. They are being asked to pay rent. The op-ed is defending their right to live in a public-subsidized penthouse while the public subsidy is held to ransom. The op-ed is not serious. The op-ed is what the op-ed industry produces when the op-ed industry has lost the ability to distinguish between analysis and advertising.

Read the op-ed again with this in mind. Every line is a sales pitch. Every prediction is a marketing claim. Every appeal to the American Dream is a pitch to the demographic Exit Stage Left Advisors wants to believe the pitch.

The op-ed is an advertisement pretending to be a column. Treat it accordingly.

DEFCON 1+ — Prophetic Indictment

When to use: When the audience responds to moral authority with edge; the register that fuses wrathful-compassion with the canonical record of moral witness.

The prophets knew the pattern. Jeremiah knew it. Ezekiel knew it. Hosea knew it. A people learn to clothe their worst in their best, and the clothing is the damn danger — not the conduct underneath, but the vocabulary that lets the conduct call itself virtue. Jeremiah, addressing the people of his time, named what the vocabulary produced: they had acquired what the prophet called the unblushing face, the capacity to perform shamelessness without the inconvenience of shame (Jeremiah 6:15; 8:12). The prophet’s work is to name what the clothing hides. The prophet is not the enemy of the people. The prophet is the friend who refuses the vocabulary.

The op-ed in question is a small instance of the pattern, and a useful one. Ted Jenkin, the man whose company is named after the operation his customers are paying him to perform, has published a column explaining that the wealthiest residents of California are being mistreated by a state that has stopped “attracting” them and started “tapping” them. The vocabulary is, in its way, perfect. The column is not about tax rates. The column is about whether the wealthiest residents of California have any obligation to the public substrate that produced their wealth, and the column’s answer is that the obligation is the source of the mistreatment. The column reframes the request to pay as the act of being wronged. The vocabulary is the trick. The vocabulary is the part that has to be named.

The Hebrew prophets had a word for this kind of operation. They called it the whitewash. Ezekiel, addressing the prophets of his time who “daubed it with untempered mortar” — who told the people what they wanted to hear, who built walls the people wanted and then covered the walls in plaster that did not hold — captured the architecture exactly (Ezekiel 13:10). The wall is rotten. The whitewash is fresh. The whitewash is the part you see. The rot is the part you do not see, because the whitewash is doing the work of making sure you do not look. The op-ed is whitewash. The wall behind the whitewash is the wealth class’s documented refusal to pay for the public infrastructure that produced its wealth. The whitewash is “freedom” and “the American Dream” and “predictability” and “successful entrepreneurs.” The wall is what the whitewash covers.

There is another name for the whitewash in the canonical record. Hosea named it the harlot’s hire — the fee that is paid for services rendered to a public, and that is pocketed as if it were a private entitlement (Hosea 9:1; Micah 1:7). The billionaires in the column are, in Hosea’s image, pocketing the harlot’s hire of California’s public investment and calling the fee a private accomplishment. The state that built them is being asked to call the fee a private accomplishment. The state is being asked to call the wealth it produced a wealth the state has no claim on. The vocabulary is the trick. The vocabulary is what allows the wealth class to call its own extraction a “successful” outcome.

The column warns that “tax policies rarely stay confined to their original targets.” The column invokes the federal income tax’s historical expansion as evidence for the warning. The column is doing what whitewash does — it is converting a structural argument into a personal one. The structural argument is that wealth has been extracting from a public commons for forty years and the public commons has been declining for the same forty years. The personal argument is that billionaires are being mistreated because they are being asked to chip in for the commons. The personal argument is the whitewash. The structural argument is the wall.

Naomi Klein named something close to this pattern — what she called the sacrifice zones, the regions and the populations deemed expendable in the production of someone else’s prosperity. The op-ed is asking for a sacrifice zone. The op-ed is asking you to call the sacrifice zone a victory for freedom. The op-ed is asking you to call the wealth class’s exit a vindication of the American Dream. The op-ed is asking you to identify with the wealth class’s exit because the wealth class has produced a vocabulary for the exit that sounds like the American Dream.

The op-ed is asking for a country in which the wealth class pays nothing and the rest pays for everything, and the country is asked to call this freedom. The op-ed is asking for a country in which the public commons is the wealth class’s private resource, and the public commons is asked to call this opportunity. The op-ed is asking for the sacrifice zone, and the sacrifice zone is being asked to call the sacrifice a victory. Damn the vocabulary that lets this happen. Damn the whitewash. The wall has to be seen.

The vocabulary is the whitewash. The wall behind the whitewash is the wealth class’s structural refusal to pay for the public substrate that produced its wealth. The vocabulary is what allows the wealth class to call its own extraction a “successful” outcome, and the refusal to pay a “freedom,” and the demand to leave a “rational response.” The vocabulary is what has to be named.

The wealth class is not being asked to subsidize strangers. The wealth class is being asked to pay rent. The vocabulary is what allows the wealth class to call the rent a persecution. The vocabulary is the whitewash. The wall is the wealth class’s structural extraction from the public substrate that produced its wealth. The vocabulary has to be named. The vocabulary has to be broken. By any means necessary that operate within the analytical and political instruments available to us, we name what the whitewash is hiding, and we keep the receipts.

DEFCON 1++ — Profane Scorched-Earth

When to use: When the reader needs full catharsis and the gloves come off.

Holy shit, the tax-fleeing industry has produced its own op-ed page. Ted Jenkin, the man whose fucking company is called “Exit Stage Left Advisors” and whose entire fucking business model is helping billionaires skip out on the state that built them, has published a column on a major American outlet’s opinion page telling you that the billionaires are the fucking victims. He is the broker. He is the supplier. The column is the fucking brochure. The column is an advertisement for the man who profits from the migration pretending to be a public-policy argument about the migration, and the fucking column is on the op-ed page this week, and you, the working Californian, are being asked to read the fucking brochure and believe the fucking brochure is analysis.

Let us be fucking clear about what the column is asking. The column is asking you to identify with a class of individuals whose net worth is more than the GDP of most of the countries on this planet, who, on some measures, paid effective federal tax rates last year at or below those of their fucking secretaries, who, in documented cases, have spent recent years engineering stock buybacks to inflate their personal net worth while their companies’ employees worked through a fucking pandemic on fucking hazard pay, and who are now threatening to move to fucking Nevada because the state that built them, the state that educated their workers, the state that paved their roads, the state that enforced their contracts, the state that subsidized their fucking research — that fucking state has the unmitigated fucking audacity to ask them to chip in for the schools and hospitals and transit and emergency services that made their fucking billions possible. The column is asking you to call this mistreatment. The column is asking you to call the request to pay fucking rent a fucking persecution. The column is asking you to defend the right of the wealthiest residents in the history of the species to skip out on the bill for the fucking society that produced their fucking wealth.

The column is called “California’s wealthy are trading the Golden State for the Golden Nugget.” The fucking title is a sales pitch. The fucking subtitle of the column is “The Golden State may still have the sunshine. But for a growing number of Americans, the Golden Nugget is currently looking a lot more valuable.” The fucking title is a fucking advertisement for Nevada disguised as a fucking analysis of California. The fucking column is not in any meaningful sense an analysis. The fucking column is what the fucking op-ed industry produces when the fucking op-ed industry has lost the fucking ability to tell the fucking difference between an analysis and a fucking advertisement.

The fucking author’s business is called Exit Stage Left Advisors. The fucking author’s business exists to facilitate the migration the fucking column is endorsing. The fucking author is the supplier. The fucking column is the product. The fucking column is not in any meaningful sense a column. The fucking column is the marketing literature for a fucking industry that exists to help the wealthy skip out on their fucking obligations, and the marketing literature is being published on the fucking op-ed page of a major American outlet because the op-ed industry has decided that the marketing literature is more profitable than the analysis.

The fucking column warns that “tax policies rarely stay confined to their original targets.” The fucking column invokes the federal income tax’s historical expansion as evidence. The fucking column is omitting the part of the story that fucking indicts the column. The fucking column is omitting the part where the federal income tax expanded because the fucking alternative was a fucking wealth aristocracy that paid fucking nothing and the fucking working class paid for fucking everything. The fucking column is omitting the part where the fucking wealth tax is the same fucking argument at the level the income tax was always trying to reach. The fucking column is omitting the part where the fucking alternative to the wealth tax is the fucking sacrifice zone — the fucking region, the fucking population, the fucking public commons that pays for the fucking wealth class’s extraction and is asked to call the extraction a fucking opportunity.

The fucking column is asking for the sacrifice zone. The fucking column is asking you to call the sacrifice zone a fucking victory. The fucking column is asking you to identify with the fucking wealth class’s exit because the wealth class has produced a fucking vocabulary for the exit that sounds like the fucking American Dream. The fucking column is asking you to betray your own fucking class interest because the wealth class has produced a fucking more articulate brochure.

The fucking author is not a fucking public-policy analyst. The fucking author is a fucking man whose fucking company gets fucking paid to help fucking billionaires move. The fucking author has produced a fucking op-ed in which he performs the fucking function his fucking company sells. The fucking op-ed is not in any meaningful fucking sense an analysis. The fucking op-ed is a fucking sales pitch for Exit Stage Left Advisors, published on the fucking op-ed page of a major American outlet, paid for by the fucking columnists’ salaries, and asking you to read the fucking sales pitch as a fucking defense of your own fucking interest.

The fucking billionaires in question are not being fucking persecuted. The fucking billionaires in question are being fucking asked to pay fucking rent. The fucking op-ed is defending their fucking right to live in a fucking public-subsidized penthouse while the fucking public subsidy is held to fucking ransom by the fucking threat of departure. The fucking op-ed is not in any meaningful sense a policy argument. The fucking op-ed is a fucking hostage negotiation dressed as a fucking policy argument, and the fucking hostage is the fucking California middle class.

Read the fucking column again. Every fucking line is a fucking sales pitch. Every fucking prediction is a fucking marketing claim. Every fucking appeal to the fucking American Dream is a fucking pitch to the fucking demographic Exit Stage Left Advisors wants to fucking believe the fucking pitch.

The fucking column is a fucking advertisement pretending to be a fucking column. Treat the fucking column accordingly.

The Deeper Breakdown

The proposed California ballot measure — the 2026 Billionaire Tax — is a one-time 5% tax on covered assets over $1 billion held by California billionaire taxpayers and trusts, projected by ITEP and the Galle-Gamage-Saez-Shanske expert report to generate roughly $100 billion in additional revenue for the State of California between 2027 and 2031, with 90% dedicated to a Billionaire Tax Health Account and 10% to a Billionaire Tax Education and Food Assistance Account. The measure is bracketed by design; it is a flat rate on a defined bracket, not a slope. The individuals the proposal targets are the same individuals whose wealth was, in documented cases, built on a substrate of California-built infrastructure, California-funded research, California-educated workers, and California-court-enforced contracts. The substrate is the public commons. The wealth is the private extraction from the public commons. The proposal asks the extraction to pay for the maintenance of the commons.

The author of the source piece, Ted Jenkin, is president of Exit Stage Left Advisors, a firm whose business model is facilitating exactly the migration the piece advocates. The piece is, in operational fact, a sales pitch for his services. The piece is published on Fox News Opinion, a publication whose tax and economic coverage has tracked with the editorial priorities of a donor network whose foundations, op-ed pages, think tanks, and state-level policy shops have spent forty years producing the exact framing the piece is selling. The piece is the brochure of an industry that profits from the migration the piece is endorsing, published on a venue whose editorial priorities align with the industry’s.

The “tax-flight” framing the piece is selling is empirically thin. The academic literature on millionaire migration — Cristobal Young’s “Millionaire Migration and Taxation of the Elite” (2016) and his subsequent book The Myth of Millionaire Tax Flight (Stanford University Press), drawn from IRS Statistics of Income panel data on 45 million returns — consistently finds that tax-driven out-migration is small, often temporary, and concentrated in retirees whose move was already planned. The U-Hauls the piece invokes are real, but most belong to working-class families leaving for housing markets that were bid up by the speculative capital flight the piece is endorsing. The very policy the piece recommends is part of the pressure pushing those families out.

The piece warns that “tax policies rarely stay confined to their original targets” and invokes the federal income tax’s historical expansion. The piece is omitting the structural argument that the federal income tax expanded because the alternative was a wealth aristocracy that paid nothing and the working class paid for everything. The wealth tax is the same argument at the level the income tax was always trying to reach. The alternative the piece is asking for is the sacrifice zone — the regions, the populations, the public commons that pay for the wealth class’s extraction and are asked to call the extraction a victory for freedom.

The “predictability” the piece invokes is the predictability of a system in which the wealthy are not asked to contribute to the maintenance of the public substrate that produced their wealth. The predictability the piece is asking for is the predictability of a permanent wealth aristocracy. The piece is not in any meaningful sense a policy argument. The piece is a sales pitch from the man who gets paid to help the rich run, asking you to convince yourself the running is the moral thing to do.

The piece’s central claim is that billionaires are being persecuted by California’s “aggressive tax environment.” The piece offers no evidence beyond anecdote. The piece does not engage the academic literature on millionaire migration, the IRS SOI panel data, the documented history of state-level wealth taxes, or the empirical finding that states raising taxes on the wealthy do not lose revenue at rates that meaningfully change the wealth distribution. The piece substitutes U-Haul reservations for the empirical record. The piece is, in structural fact, a brochure for an industry that profits from the migration the piece advocates, published on a venue whose editorial priorities align with the industry’s, and asking the median Californian to identify with the wealth class’s exit.