{"id":160020,"date":"2026-02-02T08:25:07","date_gmt":"2026-02-02T08:25:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/160020\/"},"modified":"2026-02-02T08:25:07","modified_gmt":"2026-02-02T08:25:07","slug":"proposed-calif-billionaire-tax-has-ultrarich-seeing-red","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/160020\/","title":{"rendered":"Proposed Calif. billionaire tax has ultrarich seeing red"},"content":{"rendered":"

If this sounds familiar to Massachusetts voters, that\u2019s because similarly hyperbolic warnings were unsuccessfully employed to fight the state\u2019s 2022 millionaires tax ballot question. Not only did a mass millionaire exodus not come to pass, two years later the state had about 35 percent more<\/a> millionaire residents, according to a report<\/a> last year by two research groups.<\/p>\n

California has more billionaires \u2014 about 200 \u2014 than any other state, and they would collectively be on the hook for an estimated $100 billion<\/a>. The proceeds would be used to backfill cuts of up to $30 billion a year<\/a> in the state\u2019s budget due to the GOP\u2019s Big Beautiful Bill. You may remember that the bill also included gigantic tax breaks for corporations and billionaires. <\/p>\n

You don\u2019t have to be a tax policy expert to sense that the deep concern over this potential ballot measure is about more than the ultrawealthy having to hand over some of their stash (a onetime amount that proponents say is less than what they earn<\/a> in investment returns in the average year). <\/p>\n

Dan Schnur, a professor in the political science department at the University of California, Berkeley, said that up until recently, voters didn\u2019t have much appetite for hiking taxes on rich people because most aspired to become rich themselves. For example, in 2022, California voters rejected a measure to slightly increase taxes on people making more than $2 million to pay for, among other things, wildfire preparation and response (whoops!). <\/p>\n

But that attitude has shifted as the fortunes of a few people grew to previously unimaginable levels<\/a> while everyone else struggled with higher prices, stagnant wages, and job insecurity. The growing resentment was certainly not assuaged last year when two of the county\u2019s richest guys, President Trump and Elon Musk, began gleefully blowing up government agencies, firing midlevel bureaucrats by the thousands, and cutting benefits to lower-income Americans.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe growing difference between wage earners and investors has been happening for a long time,\u201d Schnur said. \u201cTrump and Musk might have lit the match, but this was pretty dry kindling already.\u201d<\/p>\n

And now we are at a point when Americans at all levels are feeling hopeless and frustrated by the economic situation<\/a>. Singer\/songwriter Billie Eilish may have expressed the current anti-wealth sentiment best: \u201cIf you\u2019re a billionaire, why are you a billionaire?\u201d she said in October at an awards gathering that included billionaire Mark Zuckerberg<\/a>. \u201cNo hate, but yeah, give your money away, shorties.\u201d <\/p>\n

So you can see why American billionaires may be worried about opening the gates to a flood of tax-the-rich initiatives.<\/p>\n

A recent poll of California voters commissioned by unnamed \u201chigh-net-worth individuals\u201d<\/a> found that 48 percent of 800 respondents said they would vote for the measure, a figure that dropped slightly once they heard counterarguments. Considering the typical margin of error in election polls<\/a> and the distance from election day, that\u2019s not a result I would brag about. <\/p>\n

Meanwhile, supporters say their own data and experience indicate widespread support. \u201cOur internal polling shows that this is popular across California. In every region of the state it\u2019s popular,\u201d Suzanne Jimenez, chief of staff for the SEIU-UHW, in an interview. She said that signature gatherers are reporting people clamoring to sign their petitions. That\u2019s good news for the proponents; they need to gather 875,000 valid signatures by mid April to qualify for the ballot.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, Brian Galle, a tax law professor at Berkeley who helped craft the California measure, said there is strong support for wealth taxes nationally. (He should know. He just published a treatise<\/a> on the subject: \u201cHow to Tax the Ultrarich.\u201d) \u201cAt least going back to 2020 there are a string of national polls<\/a> showing taxes on the ultrarich are wildly popular,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n

Not all California billionaires object to the proposed tax. Nvidia founder Jensen Huang said he was \u201cperfectly fine<\/a>\u201d paying his possible tab of $8 billion. Tom Steyer, a former hedge fund manager and the only billionaire running for California governor in 2026, is on board, too, saying the superrich, including himself, aren\u2019t paying<\/a> their fair share to a society that helped them amass their riches.<\/p>\n

They are among a small minority of their cohort who appear to recognize that hoarding the wealth of the nation will ultimately doom everyone, particularly as AI is poised to wipe out millions of jobs. <\/p>\n

\u201cIn a scenario where [gross domestic product] growth is 10\u201320% a year and AI is rapidly taking over the economy, yet single individuals hold appreciable fractions of the GDP, innovation is not the thing to worry about,\u201d another California billionaire, Dario Amodei, CEO of the AI company Anthropic, wrote in a recent open letter<\/a>. \u201cThe thing to worry about is a level of wealth concentration that will break society.\u201d <\/p>\n

Gulp. Now, that is something worthy of an over-the-top response.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If this sounds familiar to Massachusetts voters, that\u2019s because similarly hyperbolic warnings were unsuccessfully employed to fight the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":160021,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,9,8,77891],"class_list":["post-160020","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-california","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news","tag-horizontal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160020","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=160020"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160020\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/160021"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=160020"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=160020"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=160020"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}