据美联社周一报道，加利福尼亚州选民否决了第40号提案，即该州拟议的对亿万富翁征收的一次性税收。该提案在一场耗资巨大的竞选活动后落败，这场竞选将工会与科技界一些最富有的人物对立起来。加州州长加文·纽森也反对该提案。
California voters have rejected Proposition 40, the state’s proposed one-time tax on billionaires, the Associated Press reported Monday. The measure failed after an expensive campaign that pitted labor unions against some of tech’s wealthiest figures. It was also opposed by Gov. Gavin Newsom.
尼克·卡特居住在美国本土几乎离硅谷最远的地方，但他对加州拟议的亿万富翁税的看法却再强烈不过。
Nic Carter lives about as far from Silicon Valley as you can get within the continental U.S. but his feelings about California’s proposed tax on billionaires couldn’t have been stronger.
卡特是佛罗里达州人，也是专注于加密货币的风险投资公司Castle Island Ventures的普通合伙人。他在投票前告诉TechCrunch，他认为该提案——它在上周加州的中期选举期间被列入选票——实际上将是对其所在的佛罗里达等更加财政保守的州的巨大胜利。
Carter, a Floridian, and a general partner at the crypto-focused venture capital firm Castle Island Ventures, told TechCrunch before the vote that he thought the proposal — it was on the ballot during California’s midterm election last week — would actually have been a huge win for more fiscally conservative states like his own.
卡特上周表示：“我认为如果这类税收通过，对佛罗里达和得克萨斯将是件好事。坦率地说，加州对资本形成拥有这种半垄断地位，却因当地治理极度失能而被挥霍殆尽，这实在是一种遗憾。”第40号提案，又称加州“亿万富翁税”，是一项投票提案，提议设立一项特别的一次性5%财富税，向净资产超过10亿美元的州居民征收。该税款将追溯至2026年1月1日居住在加州的任何人，并将用于资助多项公共项目——最著名的是Medi-Cal，即该州为符合条件的低收入居民提供医疗保健的医疗补助计划。
“I think it’d be it would be great for Florida and Texas if these kinds of taxes pass,” Carter said last week. “I think it’s a shame, frankly, that California has this sort of semi-monopoly on capital formation, and that it’s being squandered by local governance that’s super dysfunctional.”Proposition 40, otherwise known as the California “billionaire’s tax,” was a ballot measure that proposed the creation of a special one-time 5% wealth tax to be levied against state residents with a net worth of more than $1 billion. The tax, which would have been applied retroactively to anyone who was residing in California on January 1, 2026, would have been used to fund a number of public programs — most notably Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid program that provides healthcare to qualifying low-income residents.
支持该提案的人士——主要是工会——表示，这只会给极少数州居民带来不便，因为加州仅有200多位亿万富翁，他们拥有的财富累计总额约为2万亿美元。作为回报，支持者称，该税将产生巨额收入。支持者预计，该税在五年内最多可筹集1000亿美元，这笔资金可用于支持公共医疗和教育。
Proponents of the proposal — largely labor unions — said it would have inconvenienced a tiny number of state residents, as California has a little over 200 billionaires who own a cumulative total of approximately $2 trillion in wealth. In return, they said, it would generate massive amounts of revenue. Its backers projected it could have raised as much as $100 billion over five years, the likes of which could then have been used to support public healthcare and education.
但反对者辩称，这会吓跑加州最富有的居民，并最终抑制增长。资本外逃论点——即加州上层阶级将永久外迁，从而耗尽州政府更稳定的收入来源——在投票前主导了商业领袖间的网上讨论。投票前发布的一份关键但有争议的分析声称，该提案实际上会让州政府长期亏损。
But opponents argued that it would scare California’s wealthiest residents out of the state and ultimately disincentivize growth. The capital flight argument — that California’s upper crust would permanently flee, thus draining a more consistent source of revenue for the state — dominated conversations online among business leaders in the run-up to the vote. A critical but contested analysis published before the vote claimed the proposal would actually have lost the state money over time.
认同这一论点的卡特曾称该税是“悬在创始人头顶的达摩克利斯之剑”。他说，威胁不仅来自这项特定的财富税，还来自预期中的未来税收。
Carter, who subscribes to this argument, had called the tax a “sword of Damocles hanging” over the heads of founders. The threat, he said, wasn’t just from this particular wealth tax but also from anticipated future taxes.
“这是在向企业家阶层发出信号，表明你们把他们视为可以掠夺的资源，”他说。
“You’re signaling to the entrepreneur class that you consider them a resource to be plundered,” he said.
卡特经常在旧金山与科技初创企业合作，他声称，此类税收将“抑制风险投资”，因为风投“未必愿意投资一家公司，如果他们知道创始人将不得不变现其巨额股份”。逻辑在于：由于许多亿万富翁将大部分财富与其公司挂钩，新晋亿万富翁为了缴税而将一定比例的财富变现将会很不方便。
Carter, who frequently works in San Francisco with tech startups, claimed such a tax would “inhibit venture capital investment” because VCs “wouldn’t necessarily want to invest in a company if they knew the founder was going to have to liquidate a huge percentage of their shares.”The logic: since many billionaires keep a majority of their wealth tied to their companies, it would be inconvenient for newly minted billionaires to make liquid a certain percentage of that wealth just so that they could pay the tax.
加州企业家 Jesse Tinsely 表示赞同。Tinsely 一生都在创业公司工作，是金融科技控股公司 Mainstreet 的联合创始人兼首席执行官，该公司拥有 Employer.com 和 Recruiter.com 等招聘网站。Tinsely 多年前创办了第一家创业公司，他根据自身经历表示，如果征收这项拟议税收，他所取得的成就将不可能实现。此外，他重申了一个普遍存在的担忧——创始人可能因企业资产被征税，而被迫放弃对公司的控制权。
Jesse Tinsely, a California entrepreneur who has spent his life working in startups, agreed. Tinsely is the co-founder and CEO of Mainstreet, a fintech holding company that owns employment sites like Employer.com and Recruiter.com. Tinsely founded his first startup many years ago and said that, based on his own experience, what he had accomplished wouldn’t have been possible with the proposed tax. Additionally, he reiterated a widely held fear — that founders, who could be taxed on their corporate assets, would be incentivized to give up control over their companies.
“我是白手起家创办企业的。我拥有超级投票权股份，出身是大学辍学生、身无分文、信用不良的消防员，却建立起了一家估值达数十亿美元的企业，”Tinsely 上周表示。“我认为这项税收剥夺了实现这种壮举的能力。”
“I bootstrapped my business. I have super voting shares, and I came from a [background as a] college dropout [and] broke firefighter with bad credit and whatnot, and built a business that’s valued into the billions,” Tinsely said last week. “I think it [the tax] removes the ability to do something like that.”
Tinsely 称，他感觉这项拟议税收“迫使创始人选择加入一种体制”，在这种体制下，“任何想成为企业家的人都必须……筹集资金或某种资本，或者搬家。这基本上是仅有的两种选择。”该税收政策的关键设计者之一、加州大学伯克利分校法国籍经济学教授 Emmanuel Saez 在投票前告诉 TechCrunch，关于创始人失去控制权的担忧毫无根据，也不是该提案的设计初衷。Saez 与另一位伯克利经济学家 Gabriel Zucman 共同帮助创建并推动了这项投票提案。
Tinsely said he felt the proposed tax “forces founders to opt into a system” where “anyone who wants to become an entrepreneur has to…raise money or some type of capital, or move. Those are basically the only two options.”One of the key architects of the tax policy, Emmanuel Saez, told TechCrunch before the vote that fears about loss of founder control were unfounded, and not part of the design of the proposal. Saez, a French economics professor at the UC Berkeley, helped to create and promote the ballot measure alongside Gabriel Zucman, another Berkeley economist.
“财富税通过稀释你的经济所有权来征税，但股份可以轻松构建架构，以避免失去任何控制权，”Saez 表示，并指出许多亿万富翁仅拥有其公司极小比例的股份。他还主张，股份可以构建架构，将经济所有权与投票控制权分离。确实，实现这一目标的常见策略称为双重股份结构，即即使持股有限，也赋予创始人强大的投票权。
“The wealth tax hits you by diluting your economic ownership but [shares] can be easily structured to avoid losing any control rights,” Saez said, pointing to the fact that many billionaires only own a small percent of their companies. He’s also argued that stock can be structured to divorce economic ownership and voting control. Indeed, a common strategy to achieve this is called a dual-class share structure, which gives founders powerful voting rights even with limited shares.
萨伊兹指出，人工智能推动了加州财富的大幅增长，但这部分财富大多集中在极少数公司和个人手中，而他们中的许多人不会向州财政缴纳太多税款。他指出，加州从亿万富翁阶层那里获得的税收本来就不多。据估计，该州每年从这一群体获得的税收约为30亿美元，约占2025年至2026年间总税收收入的1%。
Saez noted that AI has helped to drive a huge explosion in wealth in California but that much of that wealth is tied to a very small number of companies and individuals, many of whom won’t pay much back into the state’s coffers. He pointed out that California doesn’t really generate that much revenue from the billionaire class anyway. The state is estimated to take in about $3 billion a year from this group, representing about 1% of the total amount of revenue brought in between 2025 and 2026.
尽管具有民粹主义吸引力，40号提案仍未能赢得足够多加州选民的支持，最终被否决。不可避免地，许多人会将原因归咎于选民缺乏热情，而反对方利用大量资金投入对此加以利用。这笔资金高达3.79亿美元，来自谷歌联合创始人谢尔盖·布林等亿万富翁的金库，他们将资金投入多管齐下的媒体攻势，旨在抹黑该提案。美联社报道，“反对”一方筹集的资金约为“支持”一方的10倍。
Despite its populist appeal, Proposition 40 struggled to win over enough Californians and was ultimately rejected. Invariably, many will cite voters’ lack of enthusiasm on a massive influx of spending that the bill’s opponents leveraged. The spending included as much as $379 million from the coffers of billionaires like Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who funneled their money into a multi-pronged media assault designed to discredit it. The AP reported that the “no” side raised roughly 10 times as much as the “yes” side.
不过，该措施的支持者表示斗争尚未结束。美联社报道，支持者称他们可能在2028年将类似的税收提案再次提交选票表决。
Supporters of the measure signaled the fight isn’t over, though. The AP reported that backers said they could put a similar tax back on the ballot in 2028.