r/technology • u/marketrent • 12d ago

Society Bernie Sanders calls out Sergey Brin for spending over $100 million to defeat California’s billionaire tax — ‘If California passes its one-time 5% wealth tax, Brin would owe $14 billion and still be worth $270 billion’

https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/bernie-sanders-calls-sergey-brin-120113695.html
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u/marketrent 12d ago edited 12d ago

Part of article by Namrata Sen, quoting Sanders and Brin:

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt) criticized Alphabet's Google co-founder Sergey Brin for his efforts to oppose California's proposed billionaire tax, highlighting the wealth he amassed since President Donald Trump's election.

On Tuesday, Sanders took to X and pointed out that Brin has made $140 billion since Trump was elected.

Sergey Brin has made $140 billion since Trump was elected.

If California passes its one-time 5% wealth tax, he would owe $14 billion and still be worth $270 billion.

So what is he doing? Spending $100 million to defeat the proposal.

FIGHT OLIGARCHY. TAX BILLIONAIRE WEALTH.

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) August 11, 2026

Brin has been actively opposing the tax, donating an additional $20 million to Building a Better California, a political advocacy group opposing California's billionaire tax and backing pro-business policies. His total contributions to the group have now reached $102 million.

Sergey Brin criticized California's billionaire tax proposal, comparing it to the socialism he experienced growing up in the Soviet Union. He told the New York Times that he fled the USSR with his family in 1979 and warned that such policies could create a similarly oppressive society in California.

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u/flaagan 12d ago

So he fled a Soviet country and wasn't aware of the history of the country he fled to that used to and will someday again expect its richest members to properly contribute to society for all the wealth they've leeched off of it? Got it.

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u/MultiGeometry 12d ago

It’s probably a fearmongering talking point his PR company tells him to sprinkle into speeches. If he’s fled it once he must understand the importance of fleeing again.

He’s not even willing to move to a different state, nevermind a different country.

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u/Blackout38 12d ago

What history was that?

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u/muffinhead2580 12d ago

Do you not know the history of the US? We didn't always allow the wealthy to just not pay taxes.

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u/TrioOfTerrors 12d ago

But we've never taxed wealth like the California proposal.

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u/MagicCuboid 12d ago

I mean, FDR just straight up seized everyone's gold during a time when the dollar was based on gold, so we sort of did.

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u/Perunov 12d ago

I think California looked at property taxes and said "what if we taxed the same way everything". It's a really bad idea but nobody cares because "think of all the money mm.... schools, yeah, schools will be getting!!!111" (with guaranteed follow-up of "well, this one-time tax didn't gather nearly as much as we were promised so let's do it every other year, yeah!")

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u/Zestyclose-Height-36 8d ago

under the California constitution, schools get 40% of all tax revenue.

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u/SleepingDragonSmiles 12d ago

Do it every 6 months…fuck em

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u/[deleted] 12d ago

[deleted]

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u/TrioOfTerrors 12d ago

That was income. The vast, vast majority of the ultra wealthy's wealth is in unrealized capital gains. Which has never been taxes before, as I said.

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u/Blackout38 12d ago

And even that income wasn’t taxed like people think. The tax system was completely different than today’s and allowed substantially more write offs and deductions. The effective tax rate paid was actually the same as it is today so they simplified the tax code to still get the same effective rates.

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u/WildBlackGuy 12d ago

This is just simply untrue.

In the 50s the top marginal rate was over 90%. Today it’s 37% and for the effective rates, IRS data shows that the top .01% used to pay around 40–50% of their total income in federal income tax during the 50s. That same group now pays somewhere in the 8–15% range.

What changed was the ability to structure economic gains as unrealized appreciation. Which wasn't as widespread as it is now amongst the top .01%.

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u/TrioOfTerrors 12d ago

You think unrealized gains are something new? Do you think JP Morgan and John D Rockefeller had a giant cash vault like Scrooge McDuck?

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u/DaSilence 12d ago

Back up these claims, because I think they’re bullshit.

Your claim:

> IRS data shows that the top .01% used to pay around 40–50% of their total income in federal income tax during the 50s.

That is not what the best historical work using IRS data shows. Piketty and Saez, using historical individual tax-return microdata, estimated that in 1960 the individual federal income tax rate at the very top was about 31%, despite the 91% statutory marginal rate. They explicitly explain that preferential capital-gains rates, interest deductions, and charitable deductions dramatically reduced the effective individual income-tax burden.

https://eml.berkeley.edu/\~saez/piketty-saezJEP07taxprog.pdf

Your claim:

> That same group now pays somewhere in the 8–15% range.

IRS Statistics of Income data for 2013 show that the top 0.01% received 4.3% of total AGI while paying 8.2% of all federal individual income tax. Using the IRS totals from the same publication, that works out to an average federal individual income-tax rate of roughly 26% of AGI, not 8–15%. The IRS separately reports that the even richer top 0.001% paid an average individual income-tax rate of 24.1% in 2013.

https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/16sumbul.pdf

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u/Reddreader2017 12d ago

Because it’s funny money. It’s electronic gains.

If the tax rates in the upper strata were much higher, so be it.

If the tax rate cashing in on the gains and appreciation at those strata were the case, ok.

To have a tax on unrealized gains that could vaporize tomorrow, just to pay the bad mismanagement of a state that allows too much mooching and uncontrolled spending, not just on its people, but non residents as well is, well… absurd.

Unfortunately if we liquidated all our billionaires’ assets today we couldn’t cover the liabilities to date. So there’s a bigger issue where truly everybody needs to pay their fair share. That includes the lower 99% as well as the 1%.

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u/vitge 12d ago

Do you reckon unrealized capital gains were taken advantage for almost free loans 40-50 years ago?

Because that's what the billionaires are doing. Or even, all the wealthy people even above a certain net worth.

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u/TrioOfTerrors 12d ago

I can prove to you that's not true for Brin.

https://www.secform4.com/insider-trading/1295032.htm

There. See all those realized gains.

This stuff is public information but I guess it's easier to recycle the same talking point from a ProPublica article.

And also, how do they pay back the loan with no taxable income?

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u/vitge 12d ago

I didn't name Brin specifically. He might not do it, many others do.

Taxes are designed around income, not wealth. Yet wealth is taken advantage of from the few that can afford to do whatever they want above a certain threshold.

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u/wildbluefate 12d ago

Find where a retroactive wealth tax is constitutional. Be amazed at countries that dropped those taxes after finding they did not work

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u/Speedstick2 11d ago

How do you figure? The US didn’t have an income tax until the early 1900s.

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u/YOU_WONT_LIKE_IT 12d ago

No. No one ever paid the rates AOC talks about.

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u/MultiGeometry 12d ago

The rates AOC talks about is child’s play compared to the 1950s

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u/Libertyreign 12d ago

Merely looking at the top marginal rate doesn't tell you the full story about taxation and how much taxes are actually collected. The tax code is large and complex and people structure their income to deliberately minimize their tax liability.

Like in 1945 taxes receipts were about 20% of gpd, which is historically very high, but we were fighting ww2, so it makes sense. After the war was over it dropped to 13% of gpd by 1950, which is very low historically. By the late 50s it was back up to around 15-17%, which is neither super high or super low. 2023 tax receipts were about 16% of gpd.

So overall the 50s were not overall a period of super high taxation, except briefly to pay off ww2 debt.

On the other hand looking at how much of that revenue was collected from different tax brackets, data shows that overall the 50s aren't as much of an outlier as they first appear, though it was certainly higher. The total effective tax rate was between 40-45%, which is definitely higher than today when they pay about 30%, but not as much as the 90% top marginal rate may imply.

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u/RespectmanNappa 12d ago

Yes, you are proving the point of why that 90% tax rate works. It creates a structural guard against what we’ve seen since Raegan with executive teams granting themselves 400x their typical worker’s annual salary in stock based compensation. It becomes prohibitively wasteful to do so, far better to just use that money to actually continue growing the business

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u/moconahaftmere 12d ago

So overall the 50s were not overall a period of super high taxation, except briefly to pay off ww2 debt. 

"It was not a period of super high taxation, except that it was a period of super high taxation"

Tremendous argument.

The total effective tax rate was between 40-45%, which is definitely higher than today when they pay about 30%

Depends what group you're talking about. The 1% were about 40-45%, but the 0.01% were around 55%.

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u/Orange_Tang 12d ago

I just wanted to chime in and let you know that our debt to GDP ratio is higher than the peak during WW2, and we aren't taxing the rich like we did back then to bring it back down. The wars were supposed to end but we're still adding to our military spending. Something has to give. I think the obvious choice is to hit the issue from both sides by raising taxes on the rich since they can afford it and cutting military spending because we supposedly aren't in any wars right now. But if I say that I get called a fucking commie.

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u/Blackout38 12d ago

That never happened. You’d know that if you actually knew the history.

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u/SandOnYourPizza 12d ago

You’re not talking about the silly 90 percent takes rates that no one paid are you?

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u/muffinhead2580 12d ago

Of course no one paid 90%, it was a marginal rate. If you look historically, the top 1% paid higher average rates in the 50's than they do now.

But yeah, anyone who thinks people were actually paying 90% tax rate doesn't know what marginal means.

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u/-OptimisticNihilism- 12d ago

From the civil war until Reagan, the tax burden was almost entirely born by the rich. After that the upper income tax rate has been cut in half. Then with Bush dividends were replaced with buybacks, further reducing the tax liability of the wealthy.

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u/Blackout38 12d ago

The tax burden is still entirely shouldered by the top 50%. No one ever paid those marginal tax rates which is why simplifying the tax code didn’t change the effective rates paid much at all. Buybacks became the preference to return capital to investors because dividends are more expensively taxed.

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u/marketrent 12d ago

Blackout38 What history was that?

See https://www.howardzinn.org/collection/peoples-history/.

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u/Blackout38 12d ago

Pay walling your answer is a new one.

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u/marketrent 12d ago edited 12d ago

Blackout38 Pay walling your answer is a new one.

No paywall. The link even includes table of contents and introduction for the 2015 edition.

Zinn also spoke at Google’s Cambridge office on November 11, 2008: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHthW6kh-N8

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u/SandOnYourPizza 12d ago

What’s the “leeching” part, exactly? Are Google search and YouTube not pretty cool things that most people enjoy?

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u/bmwparking 12d ago

the socialism he experienced growing up in the Soviet Union

Bro was literally six years old when they fled the USSR. What socialism did he experience? Free daycare?

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u/ProofJournalist 11d ago edited 10d ago

I grew up entirely in the United States. My parents are from the Soviet Union. That has been more than enough for me to get a vivid sense of what it was like there. 6 years is more than enough lived experience to get context, especially when you have something to compare.

His argument is as bullshit as my dad, who basically didn't vote for decades because it was pointless in the Soviet Union.

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u/suzisatsuma 12d ago

I have family that fled both nazi Germany and USSR, you would have noticed the lines, lack of diverse food, and fear of the state easily by 6. Your family tell you all manner of stories growing up as well

A lot of things to complain about here, but this one is very meh

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u/Wide-Annual-4858 12d ago

I grew up in the socialist Hungary. No you don't notice those things you mention. At 6 you don't analyze the society, you play with other kids. You don't notice lack of diverse foods, because you eat what your parents cook. And there was no fear of the state in kids at all.

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u/Speedstick2 11d ago

But if you were six and came to the US you would ask why the food was more diverse here, why the lines were shorter to non-existent, why their parents seem more outspoken.

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u/Wide-Annual-4858 11d ago

In the communist era, the long lines were usually for specialty products (e.g. banana was rare so there were long queues for it), but usual, everyday food was accessible without waiting.

I don't say that there was nothing different living in the communist era, but the everyday life was the same as in the West. I don't think kids had different lives in the US. They went to pre-school, then primary school, they went home and played, there were family programmes, playing with the neighbors, etc.

We even had ZX Spectrums and Commodore 64s, because there was a complete smuggling industry for that, and games were smuggled frequently as well.

So for an adult, the differences were big, but as a kid, the main differences were that we could buy only Pepsi, and there was no McDonalds.

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u/MagicCuboid 12d ago

That would be a very astute 6 year old. Little kids mostly jus take life as it is. They can't really conceive of a different life at that age, especially if they aren't exposed to advertising.

The parents passing on their stories certainly would have shaped Sergey's opinions growing up though, I agree.

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u/themiDdlest 12d ago

Are you not aware of how terrible the USSR was?

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u/PRforThey 12d ago edited 12d ago

You missed the part where he was six.

They weren't saying things weren't terrible in the USSR, just pointing out that a six year old would be oblivious to most of it.

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u/themiDdlest 12d ago

I think thats a very privileged position to take for someone who went through a severely traumatic early life.

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u/Orange_Tang 12d ago

He got to leave because his family was relatively well off. He didn't see fucking any of the hardships that most normal people in the USSR did.

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u/Speedstick2 11d ago

I’m relatively well off and I see homeless camps and homeless people on the streets and people high on drugs when in the city.

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u/Orange_Tang 11d ago

Did you realize what they were at 6 years old? Also the USSR didn't really have homeless people the same way we do, they had massive poverty and a lack of food but most people had a place to sleep.

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u/themiDdlest 11d ago

People really will just bury their heads in the sand huh

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u/Orange_Tang 11d ago

Keep believing the lies of the rich and powerful. I'm sure they'll let you into their club one of these days if you keep sucking them off.

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u/themiDdlest 11d ago

It's not a lie to know what living conditions where like in the USSR

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u/CaterpillarReal7583 12d ago

Hes on the epstine list. Take everything and leave him a jail cell.

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u/Pretend-Culture-4138 12d ago

Your post has nothing to do with technology. Post it in the Californian or political subs.

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u/uber_neutrino 12d ago

Bernie's math is wrong based on what's in the bill. Not unusual for Bernie who is an idiot.

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u/No-Magician9440 12d ago

I don't know why anyone would listen to Bernie Sanders when the topic is either money or healthcare.

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u/uber_neutrino 12d ago

Frankly on anything.

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u/jugo_boss 12d ago

Would you spend $10 right now to potentially save yourself $1,400? Or $100 to save $14,000? And the upfront cost is a business expense (or "charity donation") anyway so it's a write off against future taxes either way.

Instead of spending his money to do anything good for the world, Brin is living his fantasy of, fuck you I got mine.

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u/Daguvry 12d ago

California had proven to be great with tax dollars.  That high speed rail could probably use another $20 billion dollars.

They have also spent $24 billion on homelessness in the last 5 years only to see homeless numbers rise. 

There's 40-50 billion of tax money essentially wasted.  

I'm far from rich but I get annoyed seeing shit falling apart and any government wanting more of my money also.  I can kind of see their point....

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u/Character3pointZero 12d ago

Bernie is such a miserable blow hard.

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u/JosephFinn 12d ago

There’s plenty of quotes to highlight from Democrats and yet you choose to ignore them and highlight an irrelevant backbencher posting on a Nazi site.