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Comment by frogblast | Hacker News Reader

This is fearmongering. The bill was introduced a year ago, went nowhere, and is now dead. This WSJ article was published a month after the bill was officially killed…

The broader legislature has no interest in such a tax.

This is the bill in question: http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billStatusClient.xht...

Edit: also note that this article is on the WSJ opinion page, and didn’t come from the news desk.

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Thanks. This is a common pattern:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

When many policies that start in California get adopted by much of the Democratic party, even the ideas being proposed show that it is the direction at least some subset of the party wants to go down. When WSJ opinion section is covering pieces like this, it's to point out the ideas that the Democrats are floating. While it may not have passed this time, it's setting the foundation for future debate on the topic.

If you want a news side of it, here's the WSJ news talking about it during the primaries when many of the candidates were discussing it: https://www.wsj.com/articles/democrats-emerging-tax-idea-loo...

> Edit: also note that this article is on the WSJ opinion page, and didn’t come from the news desk.

Thank you. We really need news websites to some how more clearly delineate opinion pieces from news desk pieces. In the old days, you knew which was which based on what page of the paper it was on. A standard that has all online opinion pieces published with a colored background or something would really help.

There is a logo at the top that says WSJ OPINION and it says "OPINION COMMENTARY" above the headline.

Maybe it's easy to miss for someone's first time on the site, but I've personally never had any issue.

Also when WSJ posts to social media they prefix the headline with "Opinion"

It’s in squished, gray hard to read type, and not in the bounding box formed by the article title and the story.

I’m sure an eye tracker study would show that few people read that part of the page.

There is a sticky header with the WSJ OPINION logo as your scroll down the article [1]

What more do you want?

[1] https://imgur.com/a/7uN5UUX

The URL does however not reflect this, while it could. URLs are supposed to be informative.

Nobody outside of tech reads urls, nobody.

People in tech usually don't either.

> A California Plan to Chase Away the Rich, Then Keep Stalking Them

The title practically screams opinion piece. No serious outlet would write that at the top of a news piece.

It doesn’t look dead. From your own link, it has been amended in late 2020 so it seems like the idea is alive and still being pushed. Am I missing something here?

Much of the WSJ news desk is in a constant state of war against the OP-ED desk for just this reason.

thanks for pointing this out.

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