California’s latest wealth grab is already chasing away the people who create the jobs and pay the bills. Auto-loan billionaire Don Hankey told the New York Post he packed up and left for Las Vegas last December—right before the January 1 residency cutoff for Proposition 40—and he is not shy about why.
“I felt I just wasn’t treated well, and they really didn’t want me to stay there with my companies,” Hankey said.
His Hankey Group handles real estate, insurance, and car loans and still employs around 2,000 people in Southern California. The headquarters is staying in Los Angeles for now, but Hankey already owns half of an office building at 400 South 4th Street in Las Vegas. He occupies two floors and may expand next year. “There are fewer potholes in Las Vegas!” he added.
Proposition 40 is the SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West brainchild that would slap a one-time 5 percent tax on the net worth of anyone worth a billion dollars or more who was a California resident on January 1, 2026. Supporters claim it will raise about $100 billion, mostly for healthcare. Reality looks different.
A Stanford study published last month found at least seven billionaires with a combined fortune near $540 billion—roughly 30 percent of the state’s billionaire wealth—have already cut ties with California. Researchers Benjamin Jaros and Joshua Rauh estimated the tax would actually collect only $28 billion to $36 billion while wiping out years of ordinary income-tax revenue as the wealthy leave.
More than 100 economists, including four Nobel laureates and former White House Council of Economic Advisers chairman Glenn Hubbard, signed an open letter organized by economist Jon Hartley urging voters to reject the measure. They noted there is already clear evidence of flight and warned there is no guarantee the tax stays a one-time event.
“Such reputational harm could further drive capital and taxpayers out of California,” they wrote. Valuing private businesses and other illiquid assets would be a nightmare, and the measure raises serious questions about retroactive reach, interstate taxation, and constitutional limits on taxing intangible property.
“It just economically makes no sense to me.”
Hankey is not alone. Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Peter Thiel, Travis Kalanick, and others have also shifted residency or assets. Brin and allies have poured hundreds of millions into competing measures—Propositions 41 and 42—that could neutralize key parts of Prop 40 if they receive more votes.
Polls remain tight, with support for the wealth tax slipping in recent surveys while the competing measures gain ground. Opponents are already preparing legal challenges if the measure somehow passes.
SEIU-UHW president Dave Regan has pitched the tax as a five-year stopgap to backfill federal healthcare cuts and told ABC7 it simply makes billionaires “a participant in a society that’s made you incredibly wealthy.” The union dismissed the Stanford research as irrelevant.
California’s legislative analyst already projects an ongoing decline in income-tax revenue as some of the rich depart. That is the classic socialist pattern: tax the productive until they leave, then act shocked when the money stops flowing and the potholes multiply.
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour’s.
The same impulse that drives one man to eye his neighbor’s wealth now drives an entire political machine to treat successful businesses as a piggy bank. Hankey’s companies created thousands of jobs and paid plenty of ordinary taxes for decades. California’s response was to draw a line in the sand and dare him to stay. He did not. The state is already bleeding the fortunes it claims it needs, and Tuesday’s vote will only decide how much more it is willing to lose.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
