Billionaires Spend 0.07% of Their Wealth to Avoid a 5% Tax

THE CRITICS SAY BILLIONAIRES WON'T PAY. WE PAID. $293 MILLION, ALREADY, TO AD SELLERS, WHO ARE WORKERS TOO.

We are Endlessen Horrorwitz, and we write for the thirty California billionaires and spouses who put up that money to defeat Proposition 40, a one-time 5% tax on their fortunes. It is about 0.07% of what those donors are worth. The tax would raise at least $107 billion. Anyone can do the sums. We would call it a rounding error, but rounding errors do not buy three ballot measures.

We are job creators. The jobs are in ad sales, polling and the actor at the kitchen table who looks worried about 5%. A job is a job, and the state has never created one for a billionaire's pollster.

“We spent 0.07% to save 5%. That is a seventy-fold return, and the state calls it influence. We call it the only public program that has ever paid us back.”

Spend 0.07% to avoid 5% and the return is roughly seventy to one. No hospital achieves this. No school achieves this. The state will spend 90% of the proceeds on healthcare. We will spend 0.07% of ours on a thirty-second spot about healthcare. Both are services. Only one has a yield.

We are also thorough. Two of the measures we funded exist solely to cancel the first if they win more votes. Some call this redundancy. We call it a thesis stated three times. Nobody asks a bridge why it has two cables.

About 260 billionaires would owe the tax. Thirty are paying to stop it. The cynics see 230 freeloaders. Endlessen Horrorwitz sees 230 early beneficiaries with the discipline to receive the service without a purchase order. This is what scale looks like.

The tax, by its own economists' reckoning, equals roughly four months of stock gains for the richest Californians. A thing that cheap should be easy to pay. That is precisely our objection: it would set a precedent for being asked.

Nobody in this campaign is trying to buy an election. We are trying to rent a few weeks of one, and the voter keeps the ownership. After November the voter returns to full control of their decisions, minus whatever they remember from the commercials.

The alternative is a state official counting our artwork and jewellery. That is not a democracy. That is an inventory.

Whatever the vote shows on Tuesday, Endlessen Horrorwitz will register a new political committee within twelve months to oppose any future tax on wealth, in California or beyond, funded by the same donors, with the same number-one argument: it was cheap last time.

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