By Hoover Wind, Kathleen Kenna and Hadi Dadashian
It’s not about us and them.
As much as we honor the peaceful intentions of the Occupy movement, it’s not just a simple formula of 1% versus 99%.
It’s about all Americans, as Sarah Palin reminded us at the CPAC convention this weekend.
Let’s look at Mark Zuckerberg, sometimes reviled, sometimes beloved founder of Facebook.
It sounds outrageous that the social networking giant could raise $5 billion in its public stock offering.
We want all American companies to raise that kind of cash in their IPOs.
We want all American companies, all Americans — from the wealthiest to the lowest-income — to share.
Zuckerberg, hopefully, is about to show us how this is possible.
Say Facebook raises $5 billion.
This means as much as $1 billion for the rest of California.
How? That five-letter word in the current election campaign: T-A-X-E-S.
The non-partisan legislative analyst’s office in California estimates this single IPO — the largest ever for an Internet-based firm — could bring California millions, and perhaps even $1 billion, in taxes.
This has so excited California’s governor, the sometimes reviled, sometimes beloved Jerry Brown, that his staff has offered to mow Zuckerberg’s lawn in exchange.
“If it is as big as it is being billed, then on behalf of a grateful state, I will go to Mark Zuckerberg’s house and either wash his windows or mow his lawn,” says H.D. Palmer, Brown’s finance spokesman.
This is the great part: The non-partisan legislative analyst’s office and the Democrat governor’s office have both put one of California’s richest entrepreneurs on notice.
Pundits are crowing that Zuckerberg will pay the most taxes of any American in history. This is good news, no matter where you stand on tax reform, tax breaks for the rich, or tax hikes.
California is broke. With a deficit of more than $9 billion, its schools are falling apart, and its streets and highways are filling with garbage. Social services — for veterans, elders, people with disabilities, children and low-income families — have been squeezed and squeezed and squeezed.
Slashbacks across all levels of government have hit all public services, from policing to economic development, like a tsunami.
To international visitors, it appears that California’s homeless population is growing, in major cities and small towns.
Politicians will fall all over themselves with a windfall like this. Watch for national politicians to argue about how Zuckerberg’s tax contributions should be spent — more prisons/less prisons; more affordable housing/more campaign contributions.
We’ll be watching Zuckerberg and his Facebook workers, many of whom are counting on becoming millionaires as a result of this IPO.
Will they park their new profits outside the country to avoid taxes?
Or will they share, by paying full taxes — however that is defined — to help California’s most vulnerable?
Will they, as Republican minority leaders in California insist, use this newfound tax wealth to “protect our public school students … and pay down the state’s debt service.”
You know — the debt that everyone shared in accumulating during the so-called “good years”?
hireyourneighbor 