When my late friend and college classmate Berney Strauss resurrected Dartmouth’s moribund humor magazine The Jack-o-Lantern in the fall of 1972, he showed me an old issue with a cartoon by Robert Reich, Dartmouth ’68. Berney was recruiting me to contribute to the first issue to be published under his leadership.
As I recall, the Reich cartoon depicted a small male dog looking longingly at a big female dog with question marks in a thought bubble over the little dog. I must have known at the time that Reich was the little dog — maybe Berney explained it to me — and the cartoon has in any event remained etched in my memory.
Reich’s professional thoughts have turned obsessively to screwing of the left-wing kind. Reich now advocates passage of the proposed Billionaire Tax Act that may appear on California’s 2026 ballot. The proposal aims to place a 5 percent tax on the assets of billionaires living in California.
Reich writes in the linked post: “I recently joined with one of California’s most powerful unions (SEIU’s United Healthcare Workers West, whose members work in hospitals and clinics across the state) and one of the nation’s most respected economists (Berkeley’s Emmanuel Saez) to unveil a 2026 California state ballot measure that would establish the nation’s first wealth tax.” Woo hoo! Or as we used to say at Dartmouth, Wah-Hoo-Wah!
Reich promotes it as “an emergency tax.” That “emergency” — it’s “temporary” like the old Temporary North Of Mines Building on the Minneapolis campus of the University of Minnesota. It’s a long, long way to temporary.
You can read about the destructive effects involved in taxing assets here, there, and everyhere, but you can’t find anything quite like Alastair John Pitts’s biting Pirate Wires profile of Reich in “The Secret NIMBY Millionaire Behind California’s Asset Seizure.” It’s the kind of profile that might give ad hominem argument a good name.
