Two things:

1. If wealth was only motivated by taxes and was going to leave, it would've left already. Fact is, billionaires don't want to live in Tennessee;

2. Nobody is doing the right thing to tackle any of this, including California.

The article mentions California has land and that's the key point. Unfortunately, California homeowners have been coopted into voting against their own interests to raise property values. If the house you bought in SF in 1975 for $80,000 is now worth $3M, you still only own 1 housing unit's worth of wealth. And that housing cost is an input into everything you need to buy because all the workers required for those things have to be paid high enough to pay those exorbitant rents.

Let me repeat that: high housing costs are an input into everything that you buy.

So what needs to happen? We need to stop treating housing as a speculative asset. It's simply stealing from the next generation. Worse, it's diverting investment capital from productive output because land has become the asset with the best tax treatment, highest returns and most government protections. So what does this look like?

1. Some form of land value tax. The higher the value goes, the higher the taxes go. You raise the rent and your land value taxes go up because it's more valuable;

2. Punitively tax land hoarding including second homes. We could give discounted rates to primary residences of state residents. Nobody else should get a discount. This would mean repealing Prop 13 and that's never going to happen. As an example of this, I'll bring up Prop 19. In CA you can inherit a preferential property tax rate. Prop 19 proposed to limit this to only one property could inherit this preferential rate and it barely passed (51% IIRC). Do we think that 49% of California voters have multiple properties that have property tax rates set 40+ years ago? Of course they don't. It's an example of how people vote against their own interests;

3. Part of what sold Prop 13 originally was the idea of pushing seniors out of their homes with property taxes. Well, that gave Disneyland a tax rate that was set in the 1960s. California should do what Texas does: you can defer your property taxes until you die if you're a senior but there's no capped property tax rates like incumbent SF residents have and no inherited preferential property tax rates;

4. Wind back the preferential collateralization of property for mortgage debt over time. Residential property lending now dominates bank lending and earnings. It's significantly harder to get finance for any form of productive output;

5. Wind back over time preferential tax treatment for home ownership.

Do I think any of this will happen? No.

Oh, one of the worst things to do is transaction taxes, often called stamp duty. This is where you pay a percentage of the value on purchase. This really hurts mobility. I guess it's fine if it's only on the luxury end of the market (CA's is at $5M+?) but it's not a good idea regardless.

The other part of this is to provide social housing like Vienna. The government should be a significant supplier of affordable quality housing.

California is chasing wealth that has feet