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NEW YORK, NEW YORK - DECEMBER 09: A person holds a sign that reads, "tax the billionaires, fund the ... [+] workers" in Central Park during the first snow of the season on December 09, 2020 in New York City. (Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images)

New U.S. Census Bureau figures released in the final month of 2020 show the multi-year net outmigration of people from California, New York, and Illinois has not only continued, the trend has picked up steam. Anyone who thinks this continued loss of population and income will cause progressive politicians who run these blue state governments to refrain from enacting further tax hikes, however, is unfamiliar with the workings of those statehouses and their occupants. In fact, state lawmakers in Sacramento, Albany, and Springfield have already filed legislation for 2021, or are planning to do so, that would impose further state tax increases in jurisdictions where relatively high tax and regulatory burdens are already cost prohibitive and uncompetitive, which is driving people and businesses away.

Take California, where Governor Gavin Newsom (D) and state legislators enacted a multi-billion dollar tax hike on employers back in June. There will soon be another large state tax hike in California if some Golden State legislators get their way in 2021.

On December 7, California Assemblymembers Luz Rivas (D-Arleta) & Daivd Chiu (D-San Francisco) introduced Assembly Bill 71, legislation that would impose a personal income tax hike on earnings above $1 million. The bill would also hike the states corporate income tax, generating more than $2.4 billion in annual revenue.

There were a couple of significant tax hikes that died in the California legislature in 2020, but stand a good chance of being reintroduced in 2021. One of those proposals is Assembly Bill 1253, which wouldve raised Californias top marginal income tax rate, already the nations highest, from 13.3% to 16.8%. That represents a 26.3% increase in the countrys highest top marginal state income tax rate.

Another tax hike that wasnt approved by California lawmakers in 2020 but could be reintroduced in 2021 is found in Assembly Bill 2088, legislation that wouldve imposed a state-level wealth tax. In addition to levying a first-of-its-kind state wealth tax, AB 2088 generated national media attention due to the fact that the bill seeks to tax people long after theyve left California. Legal experts and California lawmakers themselves have already warned that the proposed wealth tax and the way it reaches across state lines violate the U.S. Constitution.

Like California, New York is a Democratic-run, relatively high tax state that has experienced years of domestic net outmigration. Like their counterparts in Sacramento, New York state lawmakers are also interested in imposing tax hikes in 2021 that ostensibly target the rich.

Governor Andrew Cuomo (D) suggested earlier in the year that the prospect of 2021 tax hikes in New York would depend on whether Congress sends additional federal aid to the states. Now Cuomos tune has shifted, with the Governor indicating that another state tax hike is in the offing for New Yorkers in the new year no matter what.

You probably will see tax increases in any event, Governor Cuomo predicted for 2021 during an early December press conference. If the federal government does not send enough additional relief to be deemed adequate by Albany politicians, Cuomo warns it would lead to devastating and dramatic state tax increases for New Yorkers that would hurt families and hurt the economy.

Raising taxes on upper income households, or at least proposing to do so, is a favored activity among progressive politicians, left-leaning think tank fellows, and pundits. While proposals to raise top marginal income tax rates are certainly a way to make well off taxpayers pay even more into state coffers than they already do, such a move would also reduce the job-creating capacity of thousands of small businesses. A fact never mentioned by California, New York, and other state legislators pushing for personal income tax increases on upper income filers is that raising the top marginal income tax rate also hits small businesses that file under the individual income tax system as pass-throughs, which is how most small businesses do their taxes.

In New York for example, a personal income tax increase on income above $1,000,000 is sold as a way to make the rich pay an even larger disproportionate share of income tax collections than is already the case. But such a tax hike would also hit more than 14,000 sole proprietors who file under the individual income tax system in New York, along with more than 42,000 partnership and S-Corporation CCL owners.

Therein lies the challenge with the soak the rich approach to tax policy that is on display in so many blue state capitals. Progressive politicians put forth bills intended to raise taxes on people as rich as Barstool Sports CEO Dave Portnoy. But they end up punishing the mom & pop small businesses with higher taxes that reduce their job-creating capacity, the same small businesses whose existence Mr. Portnoy and other wealthy people are currently saving with their multi-million dollar charity fund.

Illinois voters rejected a 2020 ballot measure that wouldve repealed the states constitutional requirement to have a flat state income tax. As a result of this voter decision, Illinois lawmakers who want to raise the state income tax in 2021 are going to have to try to do so by raising the income tax rate paid by all Illinois taxpayers.

The push for such an income tax hike is reportedly what Speaker Mike Madigan (D), who has been Speaker of the Illinois House for every year but two since 1983, wants to do in 2021. Madigan is pitching a proposed income tax hike as part of his bid to remain Speaker.

The ongoing loss of population diminishes more than the tax base for states like New York, California, and Illinois. It also diminishes their clout in Congress. California is expected to lose a congressional seat for the first time ever in the post-2020 reapportionment of U.S. House seats. New York is projected to give up two congressional seats. Illinois is projected to lose one seat. A common trend among states gaining congressional seats is that they have no or a relatively low state income tax.

The average top marginal income tax rate for the seven states gaining congressional seats after reapportionment (Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Montana, North Carolina and Oregon, and Texas) is 4.45%. Meanwhile, the average top income tax rate of the ten states projected to lose congressional seats (Alabama, California, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and West Virginia) is 6.65%, more than 49% higher than the average rate for states gaining seats.

In addition to having a lower average tax rate than the states projected to lose seats, the seven states gaining congressional seats have stronger worker protection laws. Right to Work states have laws on the books protecting workers from being forced to join and fund a union as a condition of employment. Of the 10 states projected to lose seats through reapportionment, only three of them are Right to Work states (two of those three - West Virginia and Michigan - only recently enacted their Right to Work laws in the last decade). Of the seven states projected to gain congressional seats, most (four) of them have Right to Work.

A sentiment often heard from people who live in the red states that are gaining population and congressional seats is the concern that new transplants who relocated from blue states will vote for leftist politicians who end up imposing the same progressive policies that caused transplants and their employers to leave their previous state of residence. However, there is evidence to suggest that such concerns are overblown.

A poll released by the Texas Public Policy Foundation in January 2020 found that voters who have relocated to Texas supported President Trump over Hillary Clinton in 2016 by 47% to 35%. It turns out the non-native Texans supported Trump over Clinton by a wider margin that native Texans, who support President Trump 45% to 38%.

This result is similar to the findings of a CNN exit poll in the 2018 Senate race between Cruz and ORourke showing that native Texans favored ORourke by 3% compared to people who moved to Texas supporting Cruz by 15%, Chuck DeVore, Vice President at the Texas Public Policy Foundation and a former California Assemblyman, wrote for Fox News. And an earlier poll by the Texas Tribune and UT Austin found that 57% of Californians who moved to Texas were self-described conservatives compared to 27%liberals.

Business climate denier is a term that some in the California business community have used to describe blue state legislators who dont think the onerous taxation & regulation-driven departure of employers from their state is something to worry about or rectify. That term is also used to describe the blue state lawmakers who will proceed in 2021 as though continuing to ratchet up already uncompetitive tax and regulatory burdens will not have more adverse consequences, both economic and demographic. Fortunately for Californians, New Yorkers, and Illinois residents looking to escape increasingly punitive taxation and regulation, state officials in places like Tennessee, North Carolina, Florida, South Carolina, and Texas are publicly welcoming new residents who are seeking tax and regulatory relief, along with greater economic opportunity.

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California, New York, And Illinois Lawmakers Already Have New Tax Increases Planned For 2021 - Forbes

The expectations for the books Michelle and Barack Obama have just signed a deal to write are stratospherically high considering the often dull literary tradition of books written by former White House occupants.

Typically, such memoirs sell well despite being terribly polite and discreet. Theyre intended as an attempt at cementing ones legacy, not dishing dirt. But both Obamas, who have quietly returned to their life as private citizens, have devoted followings and a way with words.

There will not be a more eagerly awaited presidential autobiography than the one that hell write because of who he is and because of the fact that people have high expectations for him as a writer, David Axelrod, who was chief strategist for Obamas presidential campaigns, said recently on his podcast.

Penguin Random House announced late Tuesday that it had signed the former first couple to a joint book deal and, reportedly, its a huge one that has set off a whirlwind of gossip in the publishing industry. Financial Times says the deal topped out at $65 million, though other sources have cited amounts simply in the tens of millions of dollars.

Obama, who already has serious book-writing experience, has said he took notes during his presidency preparing to tell his story.

Michelle has largely withheld her opinions on topics of controversy, which only deepens the well of interest in her, too.

He was very revelatory in his first two books. Who wouldnt want to read this one? Washington, D.C.-based literary agent Gail Ross said. Michelle Obama, she added, is so beloved that most people would read anything she has to say about pretty much any subject.

It was an unusual move for the couple to sell their books together, and it is unclear what the strategy was behind packaging them. Publishers have been interested in both of their post-White House books for years.

Penguin Random House would not disclose the terms of the agreement other than to say a significant portion of the authors profits would be donated to charity.

We are very much looking forward to working together with President and Mrs. Obama to make each of their books global publishing events of unprecedented scope and significance, Penguin Random Houses chief executive, Markus Dohle, said in a statement.

The jumbo price tag comes at a difficult time for the book industry. But the publisher, which is the largest in the industry, might see the likely record-breaking deal as a point of pride, an investment in the culture and not strictly dollars and cents, Ross said.

The deal was brokered by Washington attorney Robert Barnett, who has previously represented Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, as well as Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton. Those books became bestsellers, of course. But expectations might run higher for the Obamas, who have a pop-culture celebrity and reputation for storytelling.

If you look back, it is rare that a presidential memoir becomes more than a Christmas gift for partisan supporters, said Bill Burton, a former Obama spokesman. President Obama has shown himself to be better at telling his story than anyone else, and my guess is that these books will be an important part of the framing of his presidency and his place in this moment.

The former presidents first memoir, Dreams From My Father, won critical acclaim. Both he and Michelle Obama are among the most well-regarded political orators of their generation. Add to that mix the historic racial barrier broken by the Obama presidency and endless questions about their reactions to specific events during his presidency.

People will want to know what the experience was like from their vantage point, what stretched them, how they kept moving forward in the darkest times and how they celebrated the triumphant ones, as well, said Joshua DuBois, who served as White House faith adviser to Barack Obama.

The dark time that many readers will be interested in is how the Obamas reacted to the recent presidential election. Donald Trumps victory was a direct rejection of the Obama presidency.

Some people will be interested in the presidents reflections should he choose to engage in them as to the degree of responsibility he thinks he bears if any for the outcome of the 2016 election and, more broadly, the decline of the Democratic Party that occurred on his watch, said Bill Galston, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a veteran of Democratic Party politics.

The open secret of post-White House memoirs is that their significance is as much about what is left unwritten, said Peter Slevin, author of the biography Michelle Obama: A Life and former Washington Post reporter.

They have got to be making some interesting choices about whats going to be between the covers of these books, he said.

The Washington Post Juliet Eilperin contributed to this report.

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The Obamas sign a jumbo book deal with Penguin Random House - The Spokesman-Review

It still makes my blood boil.

I was in my conservative-leaning club Young Americans for Freedom at Utah State University. We were discussing project assignments for group members as part of an activism event on campus. One of the assignments was baking cupcakes.

I think it would be better if the girls take care of that, said the male vice president of our group. Thats more of a lady thing anyway.

Really? Baking cupcakes is only for ladies? I respected the vice president, and we agreed on many things, but his remarks demonstrate a pervasive problem on our side of the political spectrum.

Misogyny continues to be prevalent in conservative spaces, and its presence is preventing women from feeling welcomed in those circles. Unfortunately, people on the right may be waking up to this too late.

During the 2018 midterms, The Hill, a center-right news organization, hosted pollsters Anna Greenberg and Dan Cox. Both warned that Republicans are losing young women to the Democratic party permanently. Hardly a feminist, GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham, too, warned his fellow Republicans in 2016 that they had a suburban women problem.

According to a 2019 Pew Research survey, only 45% of Americans think or personally hope the U.S. will have a woman president in their lifetime. The percentage gap widens by party. Only 26% of Republican women and 22% of Republican men say they hope to see a woman in the Oval Office. Nearly 70% of Democratic women hope for the same.

During the 2016 presidential race, when the country faced the possibility of having Hillary Clinton as chief executive, reporters asked supporters of Donald Trump how they felt about a woman president. I dont believe there should be a woman president, one female Trump supporter said in an interview. I believe in Christianity.

A female has more hormones; she could start a war in 10 seconds another woman said. Whenever I think of president, I think of man, its a mans job.

According to Utah Women and Leadership Project director Susan Madsen, these comments arent surprising at all. In Europe and the United States, when people are asked to draw a picture of an ideal leader, 75% of participants draw a tall, white man, she told me in an interview. As a result, she added, women struggle with seeing other women move up the ladder in leadership positions.

Even women already in leadership positions seem to have this problem. Conservative commentator Ann Coulter has long held the position that women shouldnt be able to vote. Rising conservative star Candace Owens asked in 2018, Do you guys think something bio-chemically happens to women who dont marry and/or have children? Responses ranged from those women will be miserable to they are crazy.

Matt Walsh, a Daily Wire host, has made similar disparaging comments about women in the past. He has said married women who choose not to have children are selfish, and women who stay single will die lonely and miserable.

Walsh also had an interesting viewpoint about President-elect Joe Bidens decision to have an all-female communications team: Every press release is going to be 95 sentences longer than it needs to be and include dozens of details that have nothing to do with the point.

We cannot say we want to appeal to women when we hold these opinions. We cannot prop up women while simultaneously tearing them down.

Conservatives are losing women to the other side. If we dont change our tone, we will lose an essential part of our voting bloc permanently.

Thats bad for women. Thats bad for Republicans. Thats bad for us all.

Taylor Cripe is a senior at Utah State University majoring in political science and journalism.

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Guest opinion: The GOP is losing women and needs to change its tone - Deseret News

Mike Cazalas|Northwest Florida Daily News

Leslie Martin Tucker's "time to move on" letter is boilerplate Democrat gaslighting drivel with boring dictionary citations, the obligatory non sequitur comparing Trump to Hitler, and the admonition to Trump supporters, her political opponents, to move on.

Putting the letter into context, if just ONE Obama-Biden-Clinton supporter can provide ONE single reference to ONE single time they moved on after Trumps election, well take her outreach as genuine and worth the digital newspaper on which it was printed.

Its been reported as factthat president Obama was briefed on efforts to infiltrate Trumps campaign using The FBIs massive and powerful resources; liberals label this a debunked conspiracy theory.

Gaslighting at its best.

Its been reported as fact, that FISA warrants to snoop on members of Trumps inner circle were secured with FALSE evidence to provide probable cause.

Fired FBI director Jim J. Edgar Comey laughingly told a friendly audience how he infiltrated Trumps inner circle, placing two agents in a room with the incoming national security advisor Mike Flynn to set a perjury trap.

This was Comeys attempt at accepting the elections outcome, right?

Fifty-six witnesses testified under oath, behind closed doors, in classified sessions, that none of them had any evidence that Trump colluded with Russia.

Many of those same people then went on panels every night telling whoever was listening that the evidence OF collusion was hiding in plain sight, for all to see.

More liberal, democrat gaslighting, with nobody ever put on those same panels to APOLOGIZE and move on.

As recently as Fall of 2019, Hillary Clinton said, Trump knows hes an illegitimate president.

Shes the living example of moving on, isnt she?

Seventy-four million of Ms. Tuckers fellow Americans will NOT move on, will NOT be muzzled, will NOT take this daily rhythm of abuse forever.

William J. Roberts, Fort Walton Beach

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LETTER: Democrats supported their candidates to the end - The Northwest Florida Daily News

The Silicon Valley exodus is real.

Since the onset of the pandemic, billionaires, venture capitalists, and even major tech firms like HP and Oracle have started to flee the Bay Area. What at first seemed like a one-off response to our new remote-work reality has become a trend: Tech's elite are leaving, and they're citing a mixture of high taxes, state regulations, and a homogenous, liberal culture as their reasons for decamping to Texas, Colorado, or Florida.

While the departures of Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, and Keith Rabois are new, the reasons that seem to have nudged them out the door date back years. The pandemic may have spurred a migration away from the West Coast, but the writing has been on the wall as far back as 2017.

Now, as we approach 2021, it seems that a long-simmering culture clash is finally coming to a head.

Read more: The tech elite are abandoning Silicon Valley in droves because of 'monoculture' and high taxes here's where they're headed

While it's likely that facets of Silicon Valley's culture had been starting to splinter for several years prior to 2017, the most public instance of a culture clash coincides, roughly, with the beginning of President Donald Trump's presidency.

In September 2016, Palmer Luckey, then the 24-year-old millionaire cofounder of virtual reality company Oculus, was discovered to be the main benefactor behind an anti-Hillary Clinton meme group. By that point, Luckey had already sold Oculus to Facebook for $2 billion and launched the Oculus Rift, the company's first major product.

According to reporting by The Daily Beast, Luckey had been financing a group called Nimble America, which described itself online as having proven "that s---posting is powerful and meme magic is real." The group had put up a billboard in Pittsburgh with Clinton's face that read "Too big to jail."

Luckey told The Daily Beast at the time that funding the group "sounded like a real jolly good time."

After the report came out, several female employees resigned from Facebook in protest and Luckey stayed out of the spotlight at Oculus events. By March 2017, he left Facebook in subsequent interviews, Luckey has said he was fired.

Luckey's departure was viewed, by some, as a politically motivated firing. In 2018, Sen. Ted Cruz asked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg during a Senate hearing why Luckey was fired, implying it was over his politics, which Zuckerberg denied.

While that was the first and most public instance of ideological differences becoming a sticking point in Silicon Valley, it wasn't the last.

The same year, Google engineer James Damore made headlines for writing an anti-diversity manifesto that spread like wildfire through Google's ranks. Damore argued that the search giant shouldn't be aiming to increase racial and gender diversity among its employees, but should instead aim for "ideological diversity." Damore also argued that the gender gap in tech is due to biological difference between men and women, not sexism.

The memo resulted in Damore's firing, but it also sparked a groundswell of support among white, male engineers at Google who felt that conversations about diversity were offensive to white men and conservatives. Around the same time, far-right communities online began revealing the identities of Google employees who identified as part of the LGBTQ community. Damore then sued Google, alleging the company discriminated against white, conservative males (Damore later dropped the suit.)

Both Luckey and Damore ended up without a job. But the reactions to their situations and the support they both received highlighted that there was a growing population of tech workers fed up with the region's culture. At the time, Business Insider's Steve Kovach argued that Silicon Valley's "liberal bubble" had burst and that the culture wars had begun.

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. Patrick Pleul/picture alliance via Getty Images

More than three years later, it seems as though that undercurrent of dissatisfaction is coinciding with the secondary effects of the coronavirus pandemic.

In years past, those who felt disgruntled, overruled, or otherwise disenfranchised by Silicon Valley's predominately liberal culture had few options. They could leave, of course, but the tech world was still firmly rooted in the Bay Area. Those who wanted a career in tech still felt like they needed to put up with skyrocketing rents and hours-long commutes.

But when offices shut down and major tech companies asked their employees to work remotely, there was no longer as strong a tether to the Bay Area. Some companies, like Twitter and Slack, freed their workers to live wherever they wanted with no expectation to ever return to their San Francisco offices. Others, like Facebook, have said employees may work remotely forever with manager approval.

Read more: An inside look at how Slack is planning to readjust salaries and retrain managers so it can let employees work from home forever

These decisions seem to have encouraged a larger shift among Silicon Valley's elite.

Palantir has moved its headquarters to Colorado and HP and Oracle moved to Texas. Palantir CEO Alex Karp told Axios in May that the company wanted to move away from the West Coast and described what he saw as an "increasing intolerance and monoculture" in the tech industry. Karp, for his part, had been living in New Hampshire for much of the pandemic.

Since then, venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston, and Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk have moved to Austin Lonsdale tweeted that the region was "more tolerant of ideological diversity," and Musk made the move after warring with California over the state's coronavirus lockdown measures.

Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison has left the region for Lanai, the island he mostly owns in Hawaii, and investor Keith Rabois is decamping for Miami, citing high taxes in San Francisco and a political culture he abhors as his reasons for leaving.

And of course, all of these moves follow venture capitalist and PayPal founder Peter Thiel's famous departure for Los Angeles in 2018, a move seemingly spurred by his dislike of Silicon Valley's liberal ideology.

Notably, Lonsdale, Musk, Rabois, and Karp all have ties to Thiel and PayPal, and Ellison is close friends with Musk and sits on Tesla's board.

So while the wave of departures from arguably the most famous tech hub in the world are, for better or worse, being spurred by the pandemic, the exodus didn't being out of the blue it's a direct result of political and ideological differences that have been building just below the surface for years.

Originally posted here:
How the Silicon Valley exodus relates to ongoing culture wars - Business Insider - Business Insider