California’s ‘Wealth’ Tax Wouldn’t Even Cover the Cost of Fraud

SEIU, the massively powerful and radical health care union, claims that California faces a ‘healthcare collapse’ due to what it calls ‘federal funding cuts’ and only an ’emergency’ 5% tax on the total net worth of anyone with over $1 billion in assets will save the state’s health care.

There are no actual ‘cuts’, what SEIU and much of California’s Democrat machine falsely describes as cuts is actually MediCal (California’s name for Medicaid) getting work requirements for healthy adults and paperwork requirements expected to force illegal aliens off MediCal.

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s efforts to provide free health care to illegal aliens is what actually endangered the state’s health care funding. The only people losing MediCal are the people who shouldn’t have it in the first place. California Democrats are however too beholden to SEIU and its rival the California Nurses Association to graciously accept the much needed reforms.

Instead, SEIU is lobbying to get its ‘California Billionaire Tax Act’ on the ballot while promising that it can make up for what it describes as $100 billion in federal ‘cuts’. That’s actually over $1 trillion across a decade. SEIU’s own fact sheet for the Billionaire Tax Act claims that California’s billionaires “hold a combined wealth of $2 trillion.”

That means the 5% tax would have to go up to 50% to cover the state’s decade-long hole.

How much would the ‘wealth tax’ actually bring in? The California Legislative Analysis (which despite its non-partisan claim tends to be biased leftward) offers no specific revenue estimates, but instead states that the “state probably would collect tens of billions of dollars”. That’s far short of the $100 billion being implicitly promised by the radical health care union.

But the $2 trillion wealth estimate depends on stock value and much of it, especially for startups, is hypothetical. Forcing massive amounts of stock sales would play havoc with stock value (and expected revenues) and the entire economy. Rather than generating $100 billion in revenue, such a wealth tax would likely result in trillions of dollars in losses to the national economy.

Not that it matters because, as the analysis warns, “it is likely that some billionaires decide to leave California” and then “the income taxes they currently pay to the state would go away with their departure.” SEIU may have a copy of Das Kapital, but they never read the fable about the goose who laid the golden egg. Instead of picking up $100 billion in one time revenue, California would take a massive hit to its annual revenues while picking up very little from the wealth tax.

What would the estimated “tens of billions of dollars” amount to? Not even enough to cover the cost of fraud that is eating California alive and which Trump’s Medicaid reforms are trying to fix.

California lost $32.6 billion to unemployment fraud alone. That official figure is generally assumed to be on the low side out of the estimated $170 billion in total payments.

Gov. Newsom’s bellicose press office recently responded to revelations of fraud by boasting that the state had recovered $5.9 billion in unemployment fraud. This is a misleading figure because the recovery mostly refers to freezing payments that had not yet been spent rather than recovering money that had already been stolen.

And $5.9 billion out of $32.6 billion is not even a fifth of the money that had been stolen.

How was it possible to lose over $32 billion to fraud? Prison inmates received over $1 billion in fraudulent claims including $421,000 paid out to death row inmates. The Employment Development Department flagged 345,000 disability insurance claims and found that 98% of the 27,000 medical providers listed on the claims were fake.

That $32.6 billion is also only the beginning out of California’s fraud woes which includes billions in untracked payments to fix homelessness. The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority alone couldn’t account for $800 million in spending.

CalFresh, California’s version of food stamps, has run payment ‘error’ rates as high as 13.4%. While CalFresh spending is federally funded, total CalFresh spending has been over $12 billion and the high rate of fraud means that California is on the hook for $2.5 billion.

In San Diego alone, nearly $35 million was stolen just from EBT food card information. Statewide seven foreign men managed to walk away with $181 million in stolen food stamp information. None of this had to happen but did through systemic mismanagement. .

Fraud permeates California’s entire social welfare system.

For example, 1 in 3 California Community College applicants or 1.2 million are fake. And those are only the ones that have been caught. ‘Remote’ college classes are filled with fake students who aren’t even in this country, who turn in AI generated papers and collect student aid.

Health care fraud, an area SEIU ought to know a lot about, routinely racks up billions, like the billion dollar fraud involving Pacific Hospital in Long Beach and Sen. Ron Calderon, who had allegedly received $100,000 in bribes from various special interests. Calderon had been endorsed by SEIU. Assemblywoman Lisa Calderon, his sister-in-law, who is also endorsed by SEIU, still serves in the California legislature.

SEIU has upheld the welfare state over any restrictions on it, while claiming that accountability and reforms would hurt the needy. Now it wants a ‘wealth tax’ that wouldn’t even begin to cover the cost of California’s systemic social welfare fraud that SEIU is at least partly responsible for.

Alma Hernandez, the executive director of SEIU California, who led the defense of Newsom during his recall, pled guilty to tax fraud, embezzlement and perjury, after diverting money to her husband and under-reporting their income by over $666,000.

Now SEIU, whose leader wouldn’t pay her own taxes, wants to tax the ‘wealthy’.

California already had a $100 billion surplus which turned into an $18 billion deficit even as Gov. Newsom was trying to spend $8.4 billion on MediCal for illegal aliens. Even if California were to confiscate all that $2 trillion in wealth, there’s no doubt that it would all be gone within a year.

The problem isn’t that California doesn’t have enough money. The problem is that it has so much money that Democrats and their allied left-wing special interest groups have gotten used to stealing huge amounts of it. When $800 million can disappear without anyone noticing, the only thing that would happen with a $100 billion ‘wealth tax’ windfall is that it would disappear just like the $100 billion surplus did.

Either California’s systemic fraud will end or the state will go bankrupt. Which will happen first?

Source: http://www.danielgreenfield.org/feeds/8049802810975730288/comments/default