I'm Sarah Lee here with my colleague Mike Watson, and this is the Influence Watch podcast.

You may have seen news reports that California is facing something called outmigration,

in which residents, including some of that states most wealthy, are picking up and moving to

greener pastures and states not

dedicated to taxing them to death. California's billionaires are most recently eyeing a ballot

measure to be voted on this November that would essentially serve as a 5% excise tax for the

crime of being a billionaire. This has led to many of the state's prominent entrepreneurs like

Google's Sergey Bren, met as Mark Zucker prominent entrepreneurs like Google's Sergey Brin,

met as Mark Zuckerberg, and PayPal's Peter Thiel to make their objections known with their feet

and their moving trucks. But what if a federal wealth tax were imposed, like the one recently

introduced by Senator Bernie Sanders and rep Roe KKana, and there was nowhere to run.

And given how much these individuals give to philanthropy for better or worse, what would

happen to that giving if Sanders and Canada were to succeed? Joining us to discuss is Andrew Wilford,

director of state policy at the National Taxpayer Union Foundation, who has been writing

about the possible

economic calamities surrounding a wealth tax for many years. Thanks for joining us, Andrew.

Thank you for having me on. Yeah, it's nice to meet you. And we always start by just kind of asking

what your organization does and what, you know, you do, and especially in reference to this particular issue.

Yeah, so we're a taxpayer organization and our goal is to make sure that, well,

our goal is to try and make sure that taxpayer resources are wisely stewarded by your representatives in Congress and

your representatives at the state level. We, that's obviously quite a quite a difficult task.

So, but we're, we're trying our best to be your advocates here in Washington and here at state capitals

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