I try to be fair to people I disagree with. Emmanuel Saez—the famous UC Berkeley economist who's considered an architect of California's proposed billionaire wealth tax—is someone I read carefully, even when I find his income inequality work unconvincing. So, when I say that his arguments for the wealth tax are not just biased or misleading but egregiously wrong, I'm not being careless. I mean it.
In a recent debate at Stanford University, Saez offered his central justification (apart from, you know, "billionaires are unfairly rich"): California's hospitals need it because the federal government cut Medicaid through last year's One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB).
