Big Companies Benefiting from Trump Tax Cut Under Siege by California Socialists
Although California’s deluge of complex taxes have already provoked many sensible business owners into relocating elsewhere, the additional taxes proposed by the state’s leftist legislators in response to President Donald Trump’s tax reform bill is apt to only worsen the ongoing exodus.
Two California legislators in particular seek to impose a tax surcharge on every California business that earns more than $1 million per year, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, so that any money businesses save from Trump’s tax bill can effectively be redistributed to the poor.
“Trump’s tax reform plan was nothing more than a middle-class tax increase. It is unconscionable to force working families to pay the price for tax breaks and loopholes benefiting corporations and wealthy individuals,” said state lawmaker Phil Ting in a statement.
“This bill will help blunt the impact of the federal tax plan on everyday Californians by protecting funding for education, affordable health care, and other core priorities,” he added.
Ting and fellow lawmaker Kevin McCarty’s bill, Assembly Constitutional Amendment 22, would specifically add a 10 percent surcharge of earnings above $1 million and produce an estimated $17 billion in added revenue per year, as reported by The Fresno Bee.
That money would then be funneled “to low-income workers in the form of an expanded earned income tax credit, tax rebates or other tax relief to be determined.”
It would also be used to fund “state-funded child care, early childhood education, affordable health care and college financial aid.”
The money would basically be used to prop up California’s already immensely bloated welfare system. Great.
There’s just one glaring problem: who would be around to pay the tax?
Businesses have been fleeing California in droves for years now because of the state’s outrageous taxes, including Toyota, Occidental Petroleum and even Nestlé USA, which announced plans to relocate its U.S. headquarters from California to Virginia last year.
Investors Business Daily contributor Terry Jones pointed out at the time that “(a)s many companies have found, California is an awful place to do business.”
“The $26-billion-a-year food conglomerate is discreet, of course, about its reasons, citing a desire to be closer to its core customers and other bland corporate pabulum,” he wrote. “But the fact is, Nestle and its corporate brethren in California that actually make things are overtaxed and overregulated.”
And apparently, Ting and McCarty want to overtax and overregulate California’s businesses even more. Wonderful.
The only saving grace for California business owners is that Ting and McCarty’s bill “has no chance of winning the necessary two-thirds vote in the Legislature needed to place it on the ballot,” according to the Bee.
Good. As it stands, California already hosts a stunningly high 8.84 percent corporate tax rate, making it among the highest in the nation. Its sales tax, property tax and income tax rates are just as bad.
If anything, California desperately needs to reduce its tax rates, but God forbid its harebrained leftist legislators ever figure this out.
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