1. United States
2. Calif.
3. Letter

I’ll keep this brief. You’re busy, and I imagine bootlicking on this scale is a full-time job. You’ve come out against wealth taxes on billionaires. You, a man worth roughly $50 million on a flattering day. Let me help you with the math your donors apparently don’t want you to do: you are 5% of a billionaire. You are not in the club. You are not adjacent to the club. You are the valet parking outside the club, and they are not coming back for you. The United States built its highways, its universities, its middle class, and its global dominance under top marginal tax rates that would make your fundraising contacts need a Xanax. That prosperity didn’t happen because we protected billionaires. It happened because we taxed them. They survived. They thrived, actually. They simply had fewer yachts, and the rest of the country had running schools. You govern a state where nurses work doubles and still can’t afford rent, where teachers sleep in cars, and where one ER visit can bankrupt a family. Let me be plain: your opposition to a wealth tax is not policy. It’s aspiration. You’re not defending your economic class. You’re cosplaying one you will never belong to, and hoping they notice. They won’t. To them, you’re a useful decimal point. And as someone who actually lives at the scale you’re pretending doesn’t need relief, I find it grotesque. You have $50 million and no perspective. They have billions and your misplaced loyalty. Nobody in this arrangement is serving the people of California except, apparently, you serving them to billionaires. Do better or do something else.