California governor fighting a billionaire tax praises a billionaire who owes New York $59 million in back taxes

…(cont) On October 11, Governor Newsom filed his own. He endorsed Proposition 42, which cancels Proposition 40 outright and bars any future tax on financial assets, retroactive or otherwise. The Hill ran the same endorsement again two days later, which tells you how hard the campaign wanted it read.

On Tuesday, Stanford economists filed a caution of their own: the tax, they wrote, could backfire.

Reconcile that filing against the table. The backfire a one-time five percent tax might produce is capital flight — a resident leaving the jurisdiction that wants to tax him. On Tuesday, the New York Post filed a different resident. It identified him by his bill: $59 million owed to the state of New York, unpaid, on the books. His address since is a $4.9 million compound in California — the jurisdiction currently fighting not to tax wealth like his. The Post's own words for him were "a convicted Wall Street fraudster"; we didn't write them and don't need to. Newsom has praised him.

That is the whole gap, hon. The tax he is fighting would have taxed precisely this. The treasury he is not helping collect from is New York's.

Fourteen days remain before California voters settle which column this lands in: the tax that would have reached him, or the measure that guarantees it never will.