I joined CNBC’s Squawk Box this morning along with Mattie Duppler to discuss the coming tech IPO boom, its impact on tax revenues, and how governments will react to the prospective windfall.
How California should handle taxing its tech unicorn companies from CNBC.
As I argue here, and I’ve said before, ambitious progressive policies will require huge amounts of new revenue, more than you can get from simply ratcheting up marginal rates. Wealth tax proposals along the lines of Senator Elizabeth Warren’s plan are where the puck is headed, and the danger is that it carries significant populist appeal that transcends party–to wit, early polling numbers show majority approval of such policies…and that’s just among Republicans. While it won’t happen in the near term at the federal level, single-party towns like Sacramento have both the policy appetite and the political will to be a wealth tax laboratory. Like Willie Sutton, revenue-hungry politicians go where the money is–and in California, that’s big tech and its IPOs.