They did a really good job on ads. Don’t look up how much they spent just on fooling the population.
It's not just thinking about the billionaires.
It's also not thinking about the suffering people whose healthcare was stolen for these billionaires and will not be restored. Their plight is far more important than billionaires crying about taxes.
TBH I'm so sick of hearing about these rich scumbags. Capitalist media focusing on billionaires is the usual bullshit, privileged distraction.
(Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_California_Proposition_40)
As tv ads continued to play, it affected how people thought about the proposition. Remember, people are really stupid and it's really easy to change their opinions on things.
people are really stupid
Wrong. People are generally intelligent.
Propaganda is just very effective, even against intelligent people, and most people don't have the extra time/energy or desire to investigate each prop. Which is a structural failure to not prioritize it, but that's the point. There are systems in place to make political research feel both not important and also very exhausting. You live in a society full of very intelligent people, a slice of those intelligent people use their positions of power to add layers upon layers of friction to the political system so that they can retain their power.
You are not surrounded by idiots, but, you ARE ruled by criminals.
I guess to me, passing this seemed like a no-brainer and there isn't any amount of propaganda that could sway me on that. How people are so confused about voting in their interests is surprising to me. But I think you have an interesting point.
That's great, but just because you happen to be informed & engaged doesn't mean the people that aren't are stupid.
I'm in favor of a wealth tax as a corrective measure, which is how this prop was structured, but on as a broader recurring tax I am against it. If I was less informed on this prop or otherwise held a stronger "If it's wrong to do it recurring then it's wrong always" position, then I would have voted against it. It doesn't take much effort to empathize with why people would be against new tax structures.
Yeah, that seems like a strange argument yo me when you look at wages over time adjusted for ibflation among the wealth classes. There really shouldn't be much of an argument.
Damn, americans are so brainwashed.
Workship capital and billionaires because hey, IT COULD YOU! You're just about to make it, and once you do, of course it will all be 100% based on merit and fuck these poor people with a loser state of mind.
One might suggest, given Canadian elections in the last few years, that you exhibit a little more humility, because one can easily point out that Canadians are very stupid too, for staying home and not voting, allowing conservative parties to sweep their provinces.
Imagine not being a billionaire and voting to not tax them.
Humans are real dumb. I'm honestly shocked we aren't still throwing feces at each other while arguing who gets the best spot in the cave.
The really frustrating part is that many Californians also voted to increase sales taxes again. Sales taxes are incredibly regressive.
They ran so many ads. I was visiting family in CA a few weeks ago and every second commercial was saying if the law passes they'll use it to put a tax on everyone. Obviously bullshit but I can understand why some lower half of the bell curve people would believe it.
Lots of comments in all the blue tsunami posts talking about how the public must finally "get it". They now think like rational humans who will choose what's best for a society and in their own best interest.
At best this is reactionary revenge voting meant to punish the ruling party for the ways policies have impacted them recently. I think the next election we'll be right back to a split government with no power to undo any of the techbro billionaire fascist ratcheting that has happened the last decade.
Gas, its about gas.
Kinda funny to take the electorate behaving the way they've always behaved as evidence of something unprecedented happening.
I'm apparently so out of touch I can't even fathom how this happened.
I know there was obviously billionaire campaigning but what was their argument? Just lies that it would somehow affect the average person? Or 60% of the state think they're temporarily embarrassed billionaires?
This is like last cycle when we voted to keep prison slavery legal.. I thought ok who is going to vote this way? Like what the fuck is wrong with people?
All of that, that the bill isn’t perfect, and there might be loopholes, and it’s hard to actually figure out what “assets” are, and on and on. Never mind the fact that any starting point would be better than nothing.
I mean even fucking Planned Parenthood came out against it [1], which is profoundly disappointing.
Sergey Brin alone supposedly spent at least $100 million to defeat it [2]. The motherfuckers even funded three different poison pill props to neutralize it. Pretty much every tactic they could use they did. Newsome and Becerra being against it didn’t help either.
Surprisingly level headed response from Jensen Huang. 5% is a drop in the bucket for these billionaires and they act like it's going to impoverish them.
Wow that took a while to find exactly their rationale for not supporting it and:
would provide only a one-time revenue boost at a time when California needs ongoing funding to recover from the impact of the federal One Big Beautiful Bill Act,
So it's a 'let the perfect be the enemy of the good' scenario. It's not good enough so better to not do anything in hopes that it will inspire more durable approach.... Ugh...
If it was just that, I would agree, but the problems went deeper than just "it's a start but not good enough"
The beneficiaries of the fund was a SINGLE union, not the whole state, and there were poison pill provisions ensuring that we couldn't do it again in future, so this would have been a one and done, not a prescident like we all hoped. So basically it was bound to fail to accomplish what we would hope even if it passed and would likely make things more difficult to get an actual tax, instead of just a narrowly applied windfall
I’ve been telling everyone the entire election cycle that we were being propagandized to hell here in CA. Every single commercial break had at least one ad about how the wealth tax was going to be used to tax regular Californians because of a “loophole” (incredibly dishonest reading of the text that almost certainly wouldn’t have survived court had anyone tried it).
Billionaires don't need arguments when they can carpet bomb the state with bullshit advertisements.
bingo. they convinced a huge number of people that they would be getting taxed more (even though they aren't billionaires) if this billionaire tax went through. People are stupid and VERY lazy and didn't check the sources of where this bullshit was coming from.
I thought 40 was gonna be an easy one... then I briefly brought it up with my gymmates and... ufff... They just automatically vote against anything related to taxes. It didn't seem like they actually read what the prop was. It literally just affected like 200 people out of millions....
Local propaganda branded 40 as an "everyone tax". Straight up lies, but people don't read stuff I guess? IDK.
I saw ads being run claiming they would take your 401k from you. Total bull but it worked.
Might have something to do with this
https://edsource.org/updates/california-has-the-lowest-literacy-rate-of-any-state-data-suggests
I hate people.
Ah fuck, this is how I find out?
Must not have even been close if it's already decided, we take forever for this typically.
Oh well. Fuck em, I want a national, if not international solution anyway. If Blue Texas is any reminder, there is no war but class war and Californian Corporate Dems aren't an ally on that. If anything, we need a national movement of pissed off poor folk to lead the charge on this.
Perhaps I've been too harsh on the idea of re-education camps. We need to not just improve K-12 schooling, we need to expand adult schooling.
The same state that voted to keep slavery 2 years ago? No way!
I know a small business owner that was afraid if this passed, “they” would come for him next.
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