Sacramento Politics and Philosophy Group

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Please use this link to purchase a ticket (there are no walk-ins):
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/enlightenment-should-california-have-a-wealth-tax-tickets-1983728476273

Are you for or against California's Billionaire Tax? We talk with two public policy/tax experts on the pros and cons on having one here.

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Hi, this is Vanessa, your ENLIGHTENMENT salon host.

I’ve been reading lots of headlines about the proposed California "Billionaire Tax Act" initiative, which aims to charge a one-time 5% tax on California residents who have over $1 billion in assets, and use that revenue to fund healthcare and education.

Gavin Newsom is against it, saying a wealth tax would stifle the innovation California is known for. Bernie Sanders is for it, saying it’s a matter of economic fairness.

Meanwhile, Silicon Valley moguls like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Alphabet’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page are eyeing the exits and buying mansions in Miami. And the healthcare workers’ union that’s sponsoring the Billionaire Tax Act has until April to collect the nearly 900,000 signatures to place the measure on the November ballot. If they succeed, we will be voting on this.

So, should we have a wealth tax in California, and across the U.S.? Will it make our currently “rich getting richer” economy more fair and socially stable? Or will it damage California’s economy and dry up government spending on healthcare and education?

To answer these questions — and to help me decide whether I’m on Team Bernie or Team Gavin — I invited two economic/public policy experts — one who helped draft this Billionaire Tax Act Initiative, and another who is somewhat skeptical of it — to come discuss wealth taxes, their pros and cons, how they work elsewhere, and their future in California and the U.S.

GUESTS:

• Darien Shanske, Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law at UC Davis
• Robert Wassmer, professor of public policy and administration at California State University, Sacramento

Please bring your questions — nothing is too dumb, too small or too big to ask.

Tickets are $10 general admission, and $5 for students. Drinks and snacks will be offered, but please feel free to BYO.
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For more information about ENLIGHTENMENT and about California Groundbreakers, go to californiagroundbreakers.org

Having established the diagnostic case in our first event, we turn now to Part III of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies — the chapters titled "A Cursed Problem," "An Alchemy, Not a Science," "I Don't Want to Be Alarmist," and "Shut It Down" — which wrestle with the question of what, if anything, can be done. The book resists easy optimism here, and that resistance creates productive space for our discussion.

We will use Part III as a launching point for exploring the broader question of civilizational navigation during a genuine phase transition. Here we draw more extensively on the Fifth Joint Point framework and on Brandon's 2024 UTOK Consilience Conference presentation Navigating the Fifth Joint Point through Enlightenment 2.0, which proposes that mindfulness of JII dynamics — justification, influence, and investment — at individual, group, and human-machine levels is an essential part of any adequate response to the challenges these technologies pose. The core argument is that Enlightenment 2.0 (a convergence of Western rational and Eastern contemplative traditions, applied not just individually but institutionally) represents the kind of civilizational wisdom upgrade that the moment demands.

Central questions for the evening include: Is the book's final prescription ("shut it down") politically or practically viable, and what would it actually require? If collective wisdom practice is part of the answer, is it sufficient against the hypercapitalist and hypermodern attractors currently driving AI development? And what would it look like to build the kinds of ecologies of practice — within organizations, institutions, and communities — that could keep us mindful of JII dynamics in our daily engagement with AI systems?

Complementary reading:

• Brian Christian's The Alignment Problem provides a more phenomenologically grounded treatment of misalignment than the Yudkowsky tradition, and is highly accessible.
• Shoshana Zuboff's work on The Age of Surveillance Capitalism gives depth to the political-economic forces driving the acceleration.
• Henriques' broader UTOK framing of the metacrisis offers the theoretical scaffolding within which all of these threads can be held together.