California Is Home to 200 Billionaires. Organizers Say It’s Time to Tax Them.

Por Marianne Dhenin — Truthout

If passed, California’s Proposition 40 would generate funding for health care, education, and food assistance programs.

Truthout is a vital news source and a living history of political struggle. If you think our work is valuable, support us with a donation of any size.

Thousands of volunteer canvassers are hitting the streets across California, fighting for a first-of-its-kind wealth tax on the state’s ballot on November 3. Those mobilizing for Proposition 40 — which would generate revenue to backfill federal funding cuts to health care, education, and food assistance programs — are up against hundreds of millions in spending on competing ballot measures from the billionaires who would be taxed by Proposition 40. Whether or not it passes, experts told Truthout the citizen-led ballot initiative is a historic measure that could serve as a model for future efforts to tax the ultra-rich.

“Either way, even if it doesn’t, but definitely if it wins, it’s going to set a new standard for the type of tax that people can demand via ballot initiative,” Benjamin Case, project lead on the Ballot Initiatives Project at Arizona University’s Center for Work and Democracy, told Truthout. “It’s the first wealth tax in the U.S., and first wealth tax of its kind in the world, and it’s also the first tax specifically on billionaires.”

The ballot measure was announced last October by high-profile progressive economists Emmanuel Saez and Robert Reich, as well as the Service Employees International Union’s (SEIU) United Healthcare Workers West, which represents 145,000 health care workers across California. Proposition 40, also called the Billionaire Tax Act, would levy a one-time 5 percent tax on the total net wealth of each of the state’s billionaires, using a retroactive residency date of January 1, 2026. It would apply to roughly 200 billionaires, including Silicon Valley titans like Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel. These individuals have seen their average annual income rise 7.5 percent on average per year over the last four decades, while wages for the average American stagnate and a growing number struggle to meet their basic needs.

Most taxes are levied on income or real estate, not wealth. The latter is meant to capture a person’s net worth, including real estate, cash, and stock holdings, minus debts. Wealth taxes remain relatively novel, outside of some examples in European nations. A recent analysis of a similar wealth tax implemented in Norway found that it did not spur significant outmigration of the ultra-rich or deter founders from starting their companies in the country. The relatively few business owners who did leave Norway under the new tax program maintained their businesses and did not stop investing in the country, according to the analysis.

“If you think about the wealthiest billionaires in California, they have a net worth of somewhere in the range of $250 billion, and our highest income tax bracket applies to everybody who makes essentially more than a million dollars. The difference between a million dollars in income and $250 billion in wealth is just astronomical,” Chris Hoene, executive director of the California Budget and Policy Center, told Truthout. “It’s an innovation to try to tax wealth, and you can do it at a very small margin and produce a lot of revenue quickly.”

Proposition 40 is expected to generate about $100 billion over the next five years. About 90 percent of that revenue would be used to replace the tens of billions of dollars that will be stripped from California’s 15 million Medicaid recipients over that same period under President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. That bill slashed taxes for the wealthiest Americans and is expected to undercut health care and social services programs nationwide. The cuts are expected to create a $100 million shortfall in California’s Medi-Cal program alone over the next five years, stripping over a million Californians of coverage and forcing clinics to shutter. SEIU estimates 145,000 health care workers could lose their jobs. The bulk of the cuts are expected to hit after the midterm election, but many across California are already bracing.

“Frontline health care workers that are in the facilities with the patients are already seeing this,” Renee Saldaña, United Healthcare Workers West’s press secretary, told Truthout. “Patients are already getting nervous about things like ‘Am I going to be able to afford my medicine? Am I going to be able to see my doctor? Some are even telling [their doctors] they’re worried about having to ration food and how they’re going to afford food along with their medical expenses.”

Julie Van Winkle, American Federation of Teachers vice president for United Teachers Los Angeles, has been canvassing for Proposition 40 alongside many more of her union’s 37,000 members. “We’re just feeling an urgency right now,” she told Truthout. “It just seems like those basic things that our parents and generations before them had as middle-class, working-class people, are slipping out of reach.”

About 10 percent of the revenue that would be generated under Proposition 40 would be used to fund K–12 education and food assistance programs, which the federal government has also slashed.

Proposition 40 has strong support from unions, health care groups, and economic and social justice organizations statewide. The California Democratic Party has also endorsed it, and prominent mainstream Democrats are mobilizing their constituents to back the measure alongside progressives like Sen. Bernie Sanders, who headlined rallies in San Francisco and Los Angeles in early October to drum up support.

However, California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, has broken with the state’s Democratic Party by condemning the measure and urging voters not to back it. On October 9, he endorsed Proposition 42, a competing measure that Hoene told Truthout amounts to “a direct assault on Proposition 40.”

Newsom joins a chorus of the ultra-rich who have spent almost a quarter of a billion dollars to block Proposition 40 through advertising campaigns and by bankrolling Proposition 42, as well as Proposition 41, another competing measure that would undermine the billionaire tax.

Proposition 42 is meant to ban new taxes based on the ownership of certain assets — the same assets Proposition 40 aims to tax. It would also prohibit the imposition of new retroactive taxes. The proposition would kill the billionaire tax if it passed with a greater margin.

Meanwhile Proposition 41 is designed to make it more difficult to pass new special taxes by requiring the state auditor to review such proposals before going to voters. It would also prohibit revenues raised through special taxes from being excluded from the state’s spending cap, which could trigger automatic refunds.

Hoene told Truthout that the language of the competing measures and their advertising campaigns seem designed to sow confusion among California voters. “The people running the campaigns opposing Proposition 40 are running a particularly misleading campaign,” he said.

Come Election Day, the best-case scenario for proponents of the billionaire tax would be for Proposition 40 to pass, and for Propositions 41 and 42 to fail. Generally, if a pair of competing propositions pass, the one with the most votes prevails. Recent polling suggests the campaigns to undermine Proposition 40 could be working and results will be tight. The Public Policy Institute of California found in September that slim majorities of likely voters support all three propositions. Proposition 42 had the largest margin of support in that poll at 54 percent. Proposition 40 lagged just behind at 52 percent.

Organizers statewide remain committed to grassroots mobilization in the face of a flush and unscrupulous opposition. “We’re being outspent hand over fist,” Van Winkle told Truthout. “They have the money, but we have the people that are willing to go out and talk to people.”

Many of United Healthcare Workers West’s members are also hitting the streets and signing up to text or phone bank to urge their neighbors to back Proposition 40. “It is incredibly all-hands-on-deck. Everybody in the union has a task of phone banking, talking to their own personal contacts, and we all gathered signatures,” Saldaña told Truthout. “The enthusiasm and will to get this done, especially from the frontline health care workers we represent, is completely off the charts. And I think it’s because they, more than anybody else in our society, know firsthand what’s going to happen if Prop. 40 doesn’t pass.”

Saldaña told Truthout that the union’s canvassers have found proponents of the billionaire tax behind most of the doors they’ve knocked. “Sometimes you don’t even have to really convince people, just ask them about Prop. 40 and they’re like, ‘Yes, tax them,’” she said. “There’s a sense that, ‘This economy is not working for me,’ [and] people are starting to get sick of billionaires trying to buy their way in terms of our elections and in terms of them not being held accountable.”

Van Winkle said she expects organizers statewide to be out fighting for the tax until polling sites close on November 3, in what feels like an existential campaign to protect the lives of frontline workers, students, families, and other community members across the state. “If you’re one of the richest people in the richest state in the richest country in the history of the world, you ought to pay your fair share,” she told Truthout. “So that working people who are increasingly facing increased prices with gas, housing, groceries, everything, can live in dignity.”

Truthout is one of only a few platforms for justice-oriented, grassroots journalism. Today, we face an existential threat.

Due to Google’s launch of AI search, we’ve seen a drastic plunge in our site traffic and, as a result, our revenue. We lost 15 percent of our readership overnight. This was a readership we painstakingly built over decades, and it vanished because Google chose corporate greed over a healthy democracy.

We are fundraising right now to meet our basic operating expenses. If you can support Truthout with a one-time or monthly donation, you will make a significant impact on our work. Anything you can do makes a difference — we appreciate your support.

This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the following terms:

Marianne Dhenin is an award-winning journalist and historian. Find their portfolio or contact them at mariannedhenin.com.

Get the news you want, delivered to your inbox every day.

Truthout must raise $38,000 for our basic publishing costs this month. We are appealing to our readers to make a one-time or monthly donation. Donate now if you can!

Fonte: Truthout