This article was originally published by Tyler Durden at ZeroHedge.
Sam Darnold just WON the Super Bowl…and LOST $71k because it was in California
Watch as Boomer Esiason explains why the players should block any future Super Bowls in California…
Here’s SchiffSovereign’s James Hickman to explain the farce…
Yesterday, the Seattle Seahawks beat the New England Patriots in Super Bowl LX at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California.
From a financial perspective, each Seahawks player will take home $178,000—payment for that particular game.
Now, given that the Super Bowl was played in California—and the players earned money playing in the game— it’s reasonable for the state of California to tax that specific income.
But that’s not the way California looks at it.
Instead, the state will go back in time, all the way to the start of the NFL season in September, and take their ‘fair share’ of the players’ ENTIRE salaries over the entire season.
This is what’s known as the state’s “jock tax,” in which they tax non-resident professional athletes based on the number of “duty days” they spend in the state—traveling, practicing, attending meetings, or playing in a game.
Both teams arrived in California last Sunday, so each player will log at least eight duty days in the state just for the Super Bowl.
They then divide those California duty days over the entire season, and you end up with a percentage. If a player spends, say, 7% of his duty days in California over the season, then the state claims the right to tax 7% of his entire annual salary— at California’s top marginal rate of 13.3%!
This is pretty crazy given that the players only earned $178,000 for that game.
But in the case of Seattle quarterback Sam Darnold, he’ll end up owing Gavin Newsom roughly $249,000 in state taxes this year.
In other words, Sam Darnold will LOSE over $70,000.
I doubt anyone will shed any tears over this (including Darnold). But it’s perfectly consistent with California’s general attitude: dig into absolutely everything they can get their hands on and take as much as humanly possible.
Sam Darnold didn’t have a choice about the venue. But a growing number of people and businesses who are free to choose whether or not to remain in California are getting the hell out.
California has recorded a net loss of residents for six consecutive years— roughly 216,000 people in 2025 alone. Since 2019, more than 200 major businesses have relocated out of the state, including Oracle, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Charles Schwab, and Chevron.
Even Hollywood is crumbling; on-location film and TV production in Los Angeles hit its lowest level since the pandemic shutdown— down 16.1% in 2025—with 42,000 entertainment jobs vanishing in just two years. Production has scattered to Georgia, the UK, Canada, and Australia, where tax incentives are far more generous. California now ranks sixth among preferred filming locations.
And California’s response is almost comically predictable. Rather than examine why people and businesses keep leaving, they propose ever more medieval measures to squeeze those who remain— or punish those who try to go.
There’s a ballot measure in the works for a “one-time” 5% wealth tax on billionaires, retroactive to January 1, 2026. Exit tax proposals have been floated to penalize wealthy residents who dare to leave.
And how does California spend all this money they confiscate?
The state budget is a nearly $500 billion—one of the largest in the country. Yet they can’t manage to make ends meet. Ever. And they squander it on some of the most insane programs.
Over the past five years, the state has poured $24 billion into homelessness programs— and a state audit found they didn’t even bother to track whether the spending reduced homelessness.
(Homelessness actually got worse.)
The state’s high-speed rail project, now more than 15 years behind schedule, has burned through $15 billion without laying a single mile of high-speed track. The latest cost estimate to complete the project has ballooned to as much as $128 billion.
Meanwhile, California is spending an estimated $9.5 billion this year alone on healthcare for illegal immigrants through Medi-Cal.
And rather than cooperate with federal immigration enforcement, Governor Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta launched an online portal where Californians can report federal ICE agents for “misconduct”— essentially using tax dollars to help obstruct immigration enforcement.
Crazy that this man—Gavin Newsom—is the current front-runner for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination. He is THE standard bearer for the political Left.
Housing is unaffordable. Crime has surged. Unemployment is above the national average. Businesses and billionaires are fleeing.
His only real policy is to confiscate as much as possible from productive people, waste it on obscene levels of misspending, and then gaslight everyone about what a spectacular job he’s doing.
Now he wants to do for the entire country what he’s done to California.
And if that happens, there will be no Texas or Florida to escape to. The jock tax mentality— reach into every pocket, stake a claim on everything, punish anyone who tries to leave—becomes national policy.
Read the full article here
