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To raise this revenue the California Legislature has under consideration a State income tax stiffer than any other in the land. Basic schedule is 33% of the Federal rate. But severe levies on unearned increment jack up the rate in some brackets as high as the Federal tax. The "radical" Assembly, where a small bloc of EPIC legislators controls the Democratic minority, passed the tax bill recently, 70-to-5. Even though a safely conservative Senate was expected to modify the measure, Governor Merriam has come in for a prodigious amount of kicking around by the Hearst Press (whose master at San Simeon would be caught squarely by the tax), industrialists and rich folk in general. Screamed the Hearst San Francisco Examiner last week: "Extortionate and confiscatory taxation will mean . . . devastation of business, paralysis of industry. . . ." Again the motion picture industry has threatened to move out, and assorted tycoons are talking about emigrating to Nevada, Hawaii, Florida, anywhere. Two nationally famous Californians have grown particularly articulate. Wrote Novelist Charles Gilman Norris (Bread, Seed, Pig Iron) in a letter which was printed in California papers of the sympathetic Hearst chain.
"It may or may not interest the legislating gentlemen assembled now in Sacramento to know that the minute the proposed State Income Tax becomes law, my wife, Kathleen Norris, and myself will put both our homes—the one in Palo Alto and our ranch near Saratoga—up for sale and move out of the State. There is no alternative for us. We pay 52% of our income now to the Federal Government at Washington and under the proposed State Income Tax Law, we shall have to pay an additional 18%, so that out of every dollar we earn from our writings, 70¢ will go out in taxes! . . .*
"No doubt there are some people in this State who still go to New York and possibly to Paris to buy their clothes. We don't. We buy them and everything we need and want right here in San Francisco. Mrs. Norris gets all her dresses, hats and personal clothing at either I. Magnin & Co. or at Ransohoff's. Gentlemen, close our account.
"Drive us out of the State, gentlemen of the legislature! You can drive us out physically, perhaps, but you can't drive our hearts away, and the time will surely come when the right-thinking people of California will drive you out of office! In the fall of 1920, I remember exclaiming joyfully: 'California, Here We Come!' Now it is: 'California, Here We Go!'"
The Argonaut simultaneously performed a miraculous journalistic somersault. The paper which had hailed Governor Merriam last autumn as "a symbol of strength, progress and stability of traditional growth" now declared: "Would Upton Sinclair have done worse in the gubernatorial chair than the man who defeated him? It may well be doubted. He might even have done better, for he has an atom or two of genius in his composition while all one can discern in Merriam is cobwebs from an empty skull. Heaven help us before we perish from the folly of having chosen such a man as Governor!"