California Wants to Steal Trump’s Tax Break Back From Top Businesses

This is unreal. Not only has California vowed to prosecute any employer who cooperates with the Trump administration on the issue of arresting and deporting illegal aliens, at least two Democrats in the state legislature want to prevent California’s largest businesses from accruing any benefit from Trump’s recent tax reform plan. If you didn’t know better, you’d think this state was run by a bunch of half-cocked Communists hellbent on destroying the free market.

If you didn’t know better.

Assemblymen Kevin McCarty and Phil Ting introduced a new bill this week that would compel companies with net earnings exceeding $1 million to hand over 10% of their tax savings to the state government. Insisting that the GOP’s tax reform plan amounted to little more than a “middle-class tax increase,” the Democrat lawmakers said they wanted to confiscate the savings and invest (read: waste) them in California social services programs.

“It is unconscionable to force working families to pay the price for tax breaks and loopholes benefiting corporations and wealthy individuals,” Ting said in a statement. “This bill will help blunt the impact of the federal tax plan on everyday Californians by protecting funding for education, affordable health care and other core priorities.”

In other words: We’re going to do everything we can to make sure that the federal government’s tax reform plan doesn’t do anything for the California economy. So if you see the rest of the country suddenly enjoying the fruits of a booming market, well, we’re sorry but we don’t play that game in California. Especially not when President Donald Trump might get the credit. We’d rather force our top companies out of the state altogether than tacitly admit that the president might actually be doing something good for the country.

To be sure, California has much to offer the entrepreneur, and there’s nothing Democrats can do short of apocalyptic self-sabotage to change that. But they can make the state much less hospitable to thriving businesses for no other reason than to stick it to Trump. That appears to be exactly what they’re planning to do, at least if these two Democrats get their way. Which, since California Democrats recently lost their supermajority in the legislature, they may not.

Between the state’s outrageous policies toward illegal immigrants, its war on the Trump administration, and its increasingly unfriendly posture towards industry, California is quickly becoming the ultimate historical example of leftism run amok. The state’s decline may not morph into catastrophe today or tomorrow, but you can bank on it just as surely as you can bank on the sun coming up in the morning. And where do you think they’ll go looking for a bailout?

They’d better hope Mexico has a few spare billion lying around.