Voters won’t give an up-or-down vote on the tax until November, but it is already proving disastrous. Several billionaires have already moved out of the state to avoid the tax, thanks to a too-clever-by-half (and probably illegal) provision that would retroactively tax billionaires who were in the state as of Jan. 1 of this year, ten months before the 2026 elections. As a result, the $100 billion in tax revenue as projected by the tax’s supporters is closer to $40 billion, according to the Hoover Institution.Therefore, the state is going to have a prolonged legal fight over a tax whose legality is dubious at best for less than half the projected revenue. Not only that, though, but those billionaires who have already moved out of the state, and those who will soon, will also be taking their taxable incomes with them. Even if California were to get its one-time 5% cut from them (it probably won’t), it will lose out on year after year of tax revenue had those billionaires stayed in the state. As a result, the Hoover Institution projects that California will actually lose $25 billion in tax revenue once those income tax losses are factored in.A tax hike that actually loses tax revenue? It is almost a perfect summation of California Democrats.CALIFORNIA SCAPEGOATS BILLIONAIRES FOR ITS RECKLESS BUDGETINGIt is tragic how predictable this entire debacle has been, and will continue to be. If the disastrous tax does somehow pass voter scrutiny, it will be a failure. As a result, California Democrats won’t cut spending, which has grown exponentially under their monopoly on state power over the past decade and a half. Instead, they will find some other way to increase taxes on residents. Most likely, that will even include another billionaire tax, because the biggest lie of any new tax is that it is only temporary.The economic illiteracy of the California Democratic Party always results in higher taxes and higher costs for everyday Californians, the kind of people just trying to get by living in a state that is economically strangling them. The failures of this billionaire tax, which hasn’t even passed yet, are yet another example of how California Democrats make everything worse as they search for ways to continue to fund their government spending addiction.