If one ever wanted to know why extreme wealth and the people who have it are so bad for America, we now have a case study.
People are starting to feel the effects of one of the cruelest pieces of legislation enacted in our lifetimes, the OBBBA, the One Big Beautiful-for-Billionaires Act, which cut a trillion dollars from Medicaid over the next ten years and handed that money over to the uber-rich to buy a second yacht, a sixth home on their own private island, or a larger private jet.
Thanks to these cuts, and added work requirements, it is estimated that 3.4 million Californians will lose Medi-Cal coverage, no medical insurance for one in ten Californians! As things stand now, California does not have the tax revenues to replace those federal dollars.
Along comes the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West with a ballot initiative for the “2026 Billionaire Tax Act” which will be on the California ballot in November if they collect the 900,000 signatures needed.
The initiative would require anyone who was living in California as of Jan. 1, 2026 with net assets beyond $1.1 billion to pay a one-time tax equal to 5 percent of those assets, while those with between $1 billion and $1.1 billion would pay a smaller percentage. Taxpayers could spread their payments across five years starting in 2027.
The billionaire tax would raise an estimated $100b from the 200 California billionaires. The tax applies only if you have more than $1 billion–if you have $999 million you do not pay the wealth tax. The state would be required to spend 90 percent of the new revenues on health care, with the rest devoted to food assistance and education.
Wealth taxes are nothing new–virtually everyone pays a type of wealth tax in the form of property taxes. What’s different about this is its laser-focus on California’s ultra-ultra-rich, whose combined wealth is approximately $2 trillion!
If billionaires have some unique skill in being billionaires, it is not related to innovation but rather to tax avoidance, including devising tax loopholes and undermining enforcement. The California Wealth Tax has brought billionaire greed into the open, as these uber-wealthy announce they are leaving California to avoid paying the tax. Front and center is the second greediest man in America, Larry Page, the Google co-founder who stepped down as CEO in 2019, but has seen his wealth grow, despite not having worked in over 7 years, by over $200 billion to $280 billion! In the U.S., only Elon Musk (whose demand for a trillion-dollar pay package, among other reasons, puts him at the top of the greed list) is wealthier than Page, yet, with all that money, Page is reportedly cutting ties with California to duck the wealth tax.
Try to put this all in perspective. He has $280 billion. The tax would be $14 billion, leaving him with $266 billion (more than enough for most folks). That $14 billion might enable one million Californians to get medical insurance! Page is not only greedy, but also cruel. Does he really look himself in the mirror, after first checking his stock price, and say, “today’s going to be a good day – I’m going to screw one million people out of getting healthcare and go out and build a fortified bunker”?
When asked what he thought about this, Dave Nixon, a California member of the Patriotic Millionaires said, “It’s sickening and greedy…. California’s higher taxes on wealthy people like me are exactly what makes it the kind of state I want to live in.”
Tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars will be spent by the state’s most powerful to defeat this initiative if it qualifies for the ballot, flooding the airwaves with distortions. Surprise, surprise: Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post even editorialized against it. The argument, without any evidence other than a few anecdotes, is that billionaires will leave, the economy will falter, and we’ll become less innovative (Larry Page hasn’t been innovative in decades). My colleague, Igor Volsky, director of Tax the Greedy Billionaires, has countered this argument in his must-read newsletter, as has Harold Myerson in his American Prospect piece called “The Non-Exodus of California Billionaires.” Some argue that the ultra-rich will find loopholes. Maybe. Some. But what if the state only collected $50 billion—that’s a lot of healthier citizens.
It is hard to bite the hand that feeds you. Virtually everyone in America now works directly or indirectly for a billionaire, whether you work for a major newspaper, a baseball team, a bank, museums (where do the contributions come from), performing arts, movies, whatever–and this, most regrettably, includes politicians. Although there is one politician who gets our Profiles in Courage Award, Congressman Ro Khanna, virtually every other politician in the state who has taken a position, led by Governor Gavin Newsom, opposes the initiative. It is incredibly ironic that Newsom went to Davos saying world leaders were rolling over to Trump and offered them knee pads (kneeling to the King), when he’s done exactly the same thing with billionaires in California. He needs those billionaires, his buddies, to support his run for President. Just what we need to stop: oligarchy
In the best op-ed of the year to date, George Monbiot writes in the Guardian, “At the root of all of our problems stands one travesty: politicians’ surrender to the super-rich.” He goes on to say, “There is one political problem from which all others follow…. It is simply stated: the extreme wealth of a small number of people.”
California has the greatest talent pool in the United States, along with great universities, which is why entrepreneurs move here. But once they become too wealthy for their own good–and ours–it is time to say good riddance. As Gil Duran wrote in his The Nerd Reich newsletter: “Tech billionaires have operated for too long in a consequence-free environment. They’ve broken our laws, invaded our privacy, polarized our society, and harvested our data. They’ve funded authoritarian movements, promoted techno-feudal governance models, and actively worked to dismantle democratic institutions…. To save democracy and freedom, we must galvanize a popular movement to defeat billionaire power. We need a French Revolution—with taxes instead of guillotines.”
Gavin Newsom, how about selling pitchforks instead of knee pads? And congratulations Larry Page, you are an obvious choice for the Second Greediest Man in America.