Socialist Gimme Gimme Gimme Grab 'Backfires Spectacularly' - LA Edition

AP Photo/Richard Vogel

Oh, the legendary American oligarchic (say that three times fast) class is just ripe for the continued plucking, or so our most prominent socialist/communistas would have you believe.

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For a prime example, just listen to the crusty, hypocritical sage of the movement who, to his great shame, is already a multiple-mansion-owning multi-millionaire who would readily accept oligarch status if someone were to hand it to him, gratis.

Being Bernie, he certainly would never do an honest day's work to earn it.

Bernie's a taker.

Always has been, and finally, after all these sour decades of cranking on people who earn what they have...

...he has a legion of minions who now espouse his 'gimme gimme gimme,' with some even in positions of power.

When he goes on the road for his Traveling Bernie Bro Show, he takes the communista barista chica along with him to fire up the crowd. Roughing it as all good freedom fighters do.

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...all while pretending to fight the rich.

These two spent years screaming about oligarchs and inequality while living like oligarchs themselves on the backs of working Americans.

While @TheDemocrats @DNC Party is going bankrupt, Bernie Sanders campaign committees … such as’Friends of Bernie Sanders’ … is spending HUNDREDS of MILLIONS on First Class ‘Oligarch’ accommodations for his rallies.

Bernie and AOC built their entire brand on attacking wealth and privilege. Turns out they love it when the money their donors send them is spent on private jets, caviar, lobster top level wine and champagne … everything they tell their donors they are fighting against.

Share this everywhere so every “Fight the Rich” “No Kings” or “Fighting Oligarchs” Leftist-Liberal sees how their heroes actually live! Sure they are too brainwashed to see the hypocrisy, but repetitive reminders eventually sink in. That’s how they were brainwashed … repetitively thru 12 years of public school and then reinforced in college.

Their policy adherents in office, like the farcical but menacing Zohran Mamdani in New York City, have promised the socialist moon to get elected and tried to implement many of their 'rape the rich' policies, with middling success.

Mamdani's pied-à-terre tax is tied up in 'Oh, no, you don't' by the courts. He ran afoul of the very oligarchs he hadn't quite realized how much he depended on to finance the city's operation by doxxing their homes in his tax campaign, and he is busy cheerfully building enmity on all sides, careening towards the socialist, Jew-free Nirvana he envisions for NYC's bleak future.

Los Angeles, on the other hand, has an actual trained and card-carrying communist as mayor, Comrade Karen 'Basura' Bass. Bass is a proud graduate of the Cuban summer camp programs.

According to Bass, they just helped pick crops and paint hallways in Cuba for school break, which seems odd, because that is not what anyone else thinks of when asked about the Venceremos Brigade she was (is?) a member of.

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...Webber alleges that Bass made 15 trips to the communist country, traveling there every six months with the Venceremos Brigade, a radical group tied to Cuban strongman Fidel Castro. The group engaged in recruiting radical US and European leftists and training them in terrorist tactics to be used in their homelands. 

Bass attended several speeches by Castro while in the Caribbean nation, and upon his death, said it was a “great loss” for Cuba, an island that was turned from a beautiful tourist destination into a third-world hellhole during the Castro regime. The country still hasn’t recovered. 

The People’s Voice said the Venceremos Brigade’s ties to domestic terror groups are legendary, with Susan Rosenberg, a member of the M19 Communist Organization, being one of its disciples. Rosenberg was affiliated with the Weather Underground, which bombed the U.S. Capitol building in 1983. 

According to Smithsonian Magazine in 2020, “New Yorker Susan Rosenberg, one of M19’s earliest members, traveled to Cuba with the Castro-friendly Venceremos Brigade, and Italian-born Silvia Baraldini was part of a front for the militant Weather Underground.” 

In a controversial move, then-President Bill Clinton pardoned Rosenberg on his last day in office in January 2001. 

And now Bass has spent the past four years figuratively blowing Los Angeles up and literally burning it to the ground, no?

So strange how that all ties together.

Anyway, as a good communist in probably the wealthiest zip codes in the country, bar none, Bass and her equally socialist city council have found that their penchant for authoritarian grab-bagging and nonsensical, emotionally driven diktats has been continuously indulged by these wealthy citizens because they could afford to put up with what was basically an annoyance.

So, in 2023, when the city council came up with the brilliant idea to fund new 'low-income housing' and - ho, boy - 'fight homelessness' by taxing the mansions of the wealthy, and put the measure on the ballot, well, how could it not pass? Who doesn't want to stick it to the rich, right?

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Naturally, there was a lawsuit when it did, and the LA Times editorial board sounded like a NJ governor telling you that illegal aliens voting never happens, or maybe only a teensy bit. See, this tax was only going to affect a teeny, tiny number of people who were already too rich anyway, so get over it.

FOR THE HOMELESS

...Los Angeles voters backed Measure ULA, a tax on high-value real estate transaction, to pay for affordable housing and homelessness prevention. The public’s support hasn’t stopped an anti-tax group and apartment landlords from banding together in a lawsuit to stop the tax from going into effect on April 1. The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn. and the Apartment Assn. of Greater Los Angeles — the groups that brought the lawsuit — were opponents of the measure.

Measure ULA affects only a tiny percentage of property sellers but could provide $600 million or more a year that could help solve the housing and homelessness crisis in the city of Los Angeles. Proponents estimated that it could fund 26,000 units of new housing over the next decade and offer thousands of tenants assistance in paying their rent. Nearly 58% of voters approved this measure in November. Clearly, voters wanted to see something big and swift done to create more affordable housing in a city that has fallen behind year after year in producing it. Now it looks as though that money won’t be coming through so swiftly.

Get over it, they did, and the tax went into effect in April of 2023.

Nithya Raman, whose late-night miraculous vote-count dumps catapulted her past Spencer Pratt in this summer mayoral primary, was giddy with anticipation and took a crowing victory lap.

...“This is truly the first housing initiative of its kind anywhere in the United States that will have such a widespread, immediate, and long-term impact on the housing and homelessness crisis,” she said.

And what it meant was this:

...The tax — which went into effect in April 2023 and was championed by socialist mayoral hopeful Councilwoman Nithya Raman — means if a property in LA sells for more than $5.4 million, the seller is taxed 4% of the price at closing. If it sells for more than $10.9 million, it increases to 5.5%.

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The LA City Council and the homeless advocate NGOs (where billions of dollars go to die) could hardly contain their glee, waiting on the big bucks to start rolling in.

What happened instead was that the owners of those homes started rolling out.

WAIT, WHUT

As my girlfriend Leslie Eastman over at Legal Insurrection noted at the time, there was a rush for the exits.

...The more tightly things are grasped, the more likely they are to slip through the fingers. Predictably, the elite who normally support progressive measures found themselves scrambling to sell their homes before the measure, known as the “Mansion Tax,” kicks in.

The real estate market might be cooling nationally, but among the multimillionaire set in Los Angeles, it has been red hot — so much so that some sellers are getting burned.

Sellers have been throwing in brand new Bentleys and McLarens and drastically slashing prices in order to incentivize a quick close.

That’s because a so-called “mansion tax” goes into effect Saturday in Los Angeles, adding a 4% tax for sellers on homes that sell for between $5 million and $10 million and 5.5% on amounts $10 million and above.

The change will add hundreds of thousands — if not millions — of dollars in additional new transfer taxes for sellers, which will go to support a homeless housing measure Angelenos passed last November.

And what's so funny is some of the names of the first celebrity millionaires beating feet are the very ones so happy to lecture you about your greed.

Isn't it always the way?

The first thing the outflow did, on top of an already depressed real estate market thanks to interest rates, was make it even uglier. Once the tax went into effect, owners stayed put.

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The other problem with the way the tax was written?

It wasn't just Mark Ruffalo's house - it was apartment buildings, etc.

What kind of morons write a tax to make building the very thing the tax is supposed to support impossibly expensive?

LA morons, that's who. A report just released by the Rand Corporation shows just how little communists and the voters who enable them understand basic economics.

LA’s “mansion tax,” sold to Angelenos as a way to tax the rich and boost housing, has instead blocked the building of 9,100 homes, wiped out 16,650 full-time construction jobs and cost $452 million in revenue.

A damning new report says the tax, officially known as United to House LA, or ULA — has had a negative impact on the city’s high-end and multi-family real estate markets and collected less than half what it was expected to generate to tackle the city’s housing crisis.

The ULA was expected to raise about $900 million a year, or $2.7 billion over its first three years. Instead, it brought in about $1.2 billion.

...Despite its nickname, LA’s “mansion tax” applies far beyond luxury homes. Apartment buildings, offices, warehouses and vacant land can all trigger the tax if they sell above the thresholds.

About 1,000 of the 9,100-plus new homes lost would have been affordable units — the very thing the tax was supposed to create — according to RAND corporation, a non-partisan, nonprofit research group.

...RAND found the ULA slashed high-value property sales by an estimated 31% through early 2026, with apartment and commercial sales falling by more than 46%.

Simply put, the tax has discouraged some owners from selling and developers from pursuing projects that, because of the tax, no longer make financial sense.

WE DON'T NEED NO STINKIN' JOBS

And a lucky thing, too.

...New research has documented a significant hit to high-value property sales and housing development since ULA took effect in 2023.

The tax also wiped out the equivalent of 16,650 full-time construction jobs and cost government agencies $452 million in lost revenue, according to RAND.

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Raman was right for probably the first time in her unremarkable and privileged life - this has had 'a widespread, immediate, and long-term impact' from which the city may never recover.

Oh, you go girl. Can't wait until you're actually the mayor. Imagine the damage then!

Both Raman and Bass have tried to revise the tax - for example, exempting new apartment buildings for the first fifteen years - but, oh, gosh, those rabid oligarch fighters! Once they get exactly what they want, they aren't letting go, and both women have had to admit defeat trying to claw back any of the insanity.

Did you know that no burned-out home in Pacific Palisades that falls within the tax parameters is exempt either?

Yeah.

What a place to live, huh?

GIMME GIMME GIMME

Editor's Note: The Democrat Party has been infected by socialism, and it's spreading FAST. Democrats are claiming there's nothing to worry about, but we know the truth.

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David Strom 12:00 PM | October 06, 2026
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