With 3.4% growth in the most recent quarter, the United States economy is officially surging.  

With 165,000 new jobs and the unemployment rate falling to 4.1% in October, so is the U.S. job market.  

Inflation continues to run hotter than ideal, but for perspective the latest 3.7% rate stands far below the 9.0% peak that we experienced under Joe Biden’s spending blowout.  

That obviously didn’t save Republicans’ fortunes in last week’s midterm elections, but it does vindicate the economic policies that brought the prosperity of which people remain too unaware, and it also offers a cautionary warning against reversing those policies to our collective peril.  

Unfortunately, that’s precisely what too many people, particularly many among the ascendant – for now – Democratic political class, hope to accomplish.  

Prominent among those dangerous ideas is a new “wealth tax” or “billionaires tax.”  

On that front, however, last week’s elections actually delivered an unexpected outbreak of economic sanity from an unlikely source: California.  

Specifically, California voters defeated Proposition 40, which would have imposed a 5% tax on the net worth of residents possessing over $1 billion in covered assets.  The measure failed notwithstanding supporters’ promises of a gusher of new revenue for government programs.  

Californians often boast that they constitute the world’s fourth-largest economy, behind only the United States, China and Germany.  If even California voters recognize the economic danger of taxing accumulated wealth, perhaps politicians governing the world’s largest economy – the U.S. – should pay attention.  

Unfortunately, the political left considers empirical evidence an impediment to their ideological fetishes.  

Senator Bernie Sanders (I – Vermont) and Representative Ro Khanna (D – California), for example, champion a federal 5% annual tax on billionaire wealth.  Senator Elizabeth Warren (D – Massachusetts) even advocates a tax beginning at $50 million, while Senator Ron Wyden (D – Oregon) has advanced proposals to tax unrealized capital gains.  

In other words, they seek to tax assets, even when those assets haven’t sold to create actual realized income.  

That critical distinction merits emphasis.  

Under our system, taxpayers generally incur capital gains taxes only when they actually sell assets to produce income.  Wealth taxes instead target the assets themselves, thereby imposing liabilities on increases in value that exist only on paper.  

To illustrate, a business owner or homeowner whose asset appreciates from $1 million to $2 million hasn't necessarily received another $1 million in spendable income.  Leftist politicians nevertheless consider that appreciation an irresistible opportunity to collect even more tax revenue.  

Accumulated wealth doesn't necessarily mean available cash, and the mere existence of something valuable doesn’t justify Washington demanding a piece of it.  

Moreover, what if those assets decline in value after owners are taxed on them?  Should they receive a refund from the government?  

As another familiar illustration, consider America’s family farmers.  

A farming family may own land worth millions of dollars because surrounding development has driven property values skyward.  That obviously doesn't mean its owners possess millions in liquid assets, however.  Their wealth may also consist of equipment, livestock and buildings necessary to produce the food we consume.  

To suddenly begin taxing that paper wealth could force families to borrow, liquidate productive assets or even sell land simply to satisfy new government tax demands.  

Extending that farming illustration, consider when natural disasters strike.  

Ranchers who lose cattle, fences and barns to wildfire may retain valuable land while simultaneously confronting enormous reconstruction expenses and devastated income.  Under wealth-tax proposals, however, government could nevertheless demand payment based on assets that generate little immediate income.  

Predictably, wealth tax advocates assure Americans that only the extraordinarily wealthy need worry.  Recurring history, however, counsels skepticism.  

When Washington introduced the federal income tax in 1913, for instance, fewer than one percent of Americans initially owed it.  Within decades, however, income taxation expanded dramatically across the middle class.  

Similarly, today's targeted billionaires tax would become tomorrow's tax on successful small businesses, and eventually ordinary families whose homes, retirement accounts and businesses have appreciated.  

Exacerbating the wealth tax idea’s impracticability, wealthier Americans possess the greatest capacity to relocate themselves and take their investments with them.  In California itself, Google co-founder Sergey Brin and other wealthy residents fled amid the Proposition 40 battle.  Even California Governor Gavin Newsom opposed the measure, warning that driving away wealthy taxpayers could ultimately damage the state's finances.  

The inescapable reality is that when government penalizes capital accumulation, it discourages the investment, entrepreneurship and innovation that sustain economic growth, create jobs and generate future tax revenues.  

And when anticipated revenues inevitably disappoint, politicians rarely abandon their spending ambitions. They simply broaden their search for additional taxpayers.  

Accordingly, Americans must reject the false choice between prosperity and “fairness” that wealth tax advocates relentlessly promote.  A growing economy, rising employment, expanding investment and greater opportunity serve ordinary Americans far better than confiscatory schemes that punish success and consume productive capital.  

California voters just offered an invaluable corrective.  If even they reject the dangerous wealth tax idea, the rest of America should have the wisdom to reject it as well.