Silicon valley is laser focused on slapping down a wealth tax they should think a lot bigger

Silicon Valley titans have been working hard and spending big to defeat California’s proposed wealth tax, but they need to broaden the fight.According to estimates calculated from public filings, tech godfathers such as Sequoia’s Michael Moritz and Kleiner Perkins’ John Doerr have spent more than $120 million on efforts to stop the tax, a bill for which recently cleared the Assembly Revenue and Taxation Committee and now heads toward the deep-blue Assembly and Senate.Per some recent reports, it has a 70% chance of passing.Fighting the tax, which would impose a 5% levy on billionaires’ net worth, is definitely a worthy cause.

The policy would be suicidal for a state already hemorrhaging residents, businesses, and revenue.Billionaires who have already fled the state in anticipation of the tax have taken an estimated $1 trillion with them.

The tech industry would be hit hardest because the tax could force founders with illiquid wealth to sell a portion of their companies just to pay the bill.But killing this one ballot measure treats the symptom, not the disease.Taxes are downstream of politics and politics is downstream of culture.The wealth tax didn’t come out of nowhere — it’s the product of California’s political culture, which Silicon Valley spent decades ignoring, and sometimes actively bankrolling. Tech needs to invest not only in fighting the tax but also in changing culture that brought it about.Billionaires should marshal serious resources toward education reform. At most University of California schools, students are required to complete at least one “diversity and cultural competency” class.

Those include offerings such as “Queer Crip Lit,” which explores the intersection of transphobia, racism, sexism, ableism and homophobia in culture, and “Decolonize you diet” which focuses on how the racism and sexism of traditional food systems.To counteract that agenda, tech should fund alternative educational programs and conservativ...