{"id":635078,"date":"2026-05-10T17:01:11","date_gmt":"2026-05-10T17:01:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/635078\/"},"modified":"2026-05-10T17:01:11","modified_gmt":"2026-05-10T17:01:11","slug":"with-food-benefit-cuts-looming-in-the-us-californians-eye-billionaire-tax-us-midterm-elections-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/635078\/","title":{"rendered":"With food benefit cuts looming in the US, Californians eye billionaire tax | US Midterm Elections 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"

San Francisco, United States \u2013 Greer Dove\u2019s days are packed with studying business and finance, as well as doing administrative work at college, along with caring for her eight-year-old daughter with special needs. But once a week, Dove, a single mother, makes sure to drop in at the food bank in California\u2019s Marin County to pick up vegetables, fruit and other food. Along with the federal government\u2019s food benefits, they keep her housing running.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe need this so we can keep functioning at a high level,\u201d she says. \u201cShe loves fruit, so I make sure to get it,\u201d she says of her daughter.<\/p>\n

Recommended Stories list of 4 itemsend of list<\/p>\n

Dove, who is also looking for a full-time job, has worked in restaurants, event management, retail, television shows, office administration and payroll over the years. But she has been on the federal government\u2019s Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) for six years, and with the food bank, for more than three years. Before she got food benefits, Dove fed her daughter all she had and skipped meals or looked around for snacks in the offices she worked at to get her through the day.<\/p>\n

United States President Donald Trump\u2019s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), passed in June, cut SNAP benefits by more than $186bn over the next 10 years to make up for extending cuts to income tax. This could lead to more than 3 million people nationwide, and 665,000 recipients in California, losing such food benefits, according to estimates.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis will bring a series of cuts that collectively present an existential threat to food benefits,\u201d says Andrew Cheyne, managing director of government relations and public affairs at the County Welfare Directors Association of California.<\/p>\n

California\u2019s proposed billionaire tax<\/a>, which seeks to impose a one-time 5 percent tax on the assets of the state\u2019s more than 200 billionaires to make up for the funding gap created by the OBBBA, got more than 1.5 million signatures in April. It is likely to be on the ballot for the November midterm election.<\/p>\n

While most of the nearly $100bn expected to be raised through the tax will go towards filling the gap in health insurance created by the OBBBA, 10 percent will be used to make up for the retrenchment in food benefits.<\/p>\n

In California, where more than 5.3 million people, more than any other state, receive food benefits, the impacts of the cuts began to be felt in April when 72,000 immigrants started losing benefits. June onwards, nearly 600,000 recipients will be screened for work eligibility. Recipients, including those who are homeless, seniors, foster youth and veterans, will have to work, study or volunteer to receive food benefits. Failing the screening to meet work requirements for three months will lead to their food benefits being cut.<\/p>\n

Brian Galle, professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley and one of the tax measure\u2019s authors, says that in California, the state that introduced gig work, \u201cjobs are increasingly precarious. You may find enough work or not. You may get tips or not. But nutrition needs are steady.\u201d<\/p>\n

Making impossible choices<\/p>\n

On a recent Friday morning, new members lined up to enrol at a whitewashed, bunting-festooned La Ofrenda food bank in San Francisco\u2019s Mission district. The food bank doles out fresh vegetables, fruit and bread that have been donated by large grocery stores once those products neared expiration date.<\/p>\n

Gladys Lee had taken a 45-minute train ride after a friend told her about it. Lee worked at downtown San Francisco\u2019s Hyatt hotel as a room cleaner for three decades until a back injury meant she could not push the heavy cleaning carts any more and had to leave. After seven years of struggling to find work, food was getting scarce, and Lee found her way to La Ofrenda. She packed what she could into a carton and held it in her arms for the train ride back.<\/p>\n

\"Food<\/a>Volunteers gathered at the La Ofrenda food bank in San Francisco\u2019s Mission District [Saumya Roy\/Al Jazeera]<\/p>\n

Food benefit rolls have shrunk by more than 3.3 million nationally in the six months from July 2025, when the OBBBA was enacted, to January 2026.<\/p>\n

In California, the rolls of Calfresh, as food benefits are known in the state, shrank by 288,000 or 6 percent from July 2025 to February 2026, according to analysis by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington, DC-based think tank. This reduction in rolls happened even before the OBBBA cuts began.<\/p>\n

Brooke Rollins, the agriculture secretary, wrote in a recent essay that the shrinking of SNAP rolls reflected an ebullient economy and buoyant job growth.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe drop in SNAP recipients affirms that many Americans are moving from welfare to work,\u201d she wrote. \u201cIt is no secret that Trump\u2019s massive tax cuts and deregulation efforts are unleashing robust, private sector-led economic growth, which are fueling trillions in investments, booming wage growth\u201d.<\/p>\n

But unemployment remained stable at about 4.4 percent since July 2025, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics data, while SNAP rolls shrank.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis last time we saw such a steep, quick decline, other than during natural disasters, is three decades ago when welfare reform was enacted,\u201d says Dottie Rosenbaum, senior fellow and director of\u00a0 Federal SNAP Policy at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.<\/p>\n

Nationally, SNAP rolls shrank by 8 percent, while in California, they shrank by 5.5 percent, in part because the work eligibility requirements were delayed until June, while some other states have already implemented them.<\/p>\n

At La Ofrenda, Roberto Alfaro, executive director of the nonprofit Homey, says he started the food bank when food costs went up during the pandemic. They have stayed high, he says. Now he sees people doing day jobs and night jobs and coming for food when they have paid rent.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople are making impossible choices,\u201d says Keely O\u2019Brien, a policy advocate at the Western Center for Law and Poverty.<\/p>\n

While California is the world\u2019s fourth-largest economy, growth has come with a soaring cost-of-living crisis.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith rising housing and utility costs, few households can dedicate that much of their income towards food,\u201d O\u2019Brien says.<\/p>\n

The OBBA has also shifted the administrative cost of meeting work eligibility requirements to states, and beginning next year, part of the cost of SNAP will also fall on states.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo make requirements more stringent, you are creating more government, more bureaucratic logjam,\u201d says Jaren Sorkow, state director for the Children\u2019s Defence Fund.<\/p>\n

This has already led to a 51 percent drop in SNAP rolls in Arizona, which has begun implementing the OBBBA cuts, according to data by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.<\/p>\n

\"Food<\/a>Food being given out at the La Ofrenda food bank in San Francisco\u2019s Mission District [Saumya Roy\/Al Jazeera[Making something from nothing<\/p>\n

Several measures to counter the $100bn gap in funding for health insurance and food benefits created by the OBBBA have been floated in California. The biggest of these is the one-time 5 percent tax on those with assets of more than a billion dollars. The tax will raise $100bn, its authors estimate.<\/p>\n

As it seems set to be voted on in the November election, it faces mounting opposition from the state\u2019s tech entrepreneurs who have funded measures to undercut the tax.<\/p>\n

Tech entrepreneurs have called it an economic 9\/11, saying taxing their assets, including shareholding in startups, will lead to a flight of capital and innovation from the state. Sergey Brin, a cofounder of Google Inc, now spends a week in Nevada and a week in his Bay Area offices and has spent more than $57m on opposing the billionaire tax. He has backed two measures that undercut the billion tax, which have also received 1.4 million and 1.5 million signatures and are also set to be on the ballot for the November election.<\/p>\n

One of these measures prohibits future taxes on personal property, including financial assets, savings and retirement accounts, as well as intellectual property. The other would increase audits of taxpayer-funded programmes, and includes language that would essentially invalidate the billionaire tax.<\/p>\n

In a recent statement to The New York Times, Brin said, \u201cI fled socialism with my family in 1979 and know the devastating, oppressive society it created in the Soviet Union. I don\u2019t want California to end up in the same place.\u201d<\/p>\n

The coalition of unions backing the billionaire tax is bracing for the fight ahead. \u201cWe expect to be outspent,\u201d says Kris Cuaresma-Primm, director of partnerships for the coalition that is backing the billionaire tax. \u201cWe will keep communicating to people that there is a tidal wave of pain coming from the cuts, and we want to reclaim the losses from the OBBBA.\u201d<\/p>\n

Giulia Varaschin, senior tax policy adviser at the International Tax Observatory, who recently coauthored a study on wealth taxes, says there is little academic evidence that such taxes cause the wealthy to leave at a notable scale. \u201cThere is only a marginal flight with very little, if any, economic impact,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

The study, coauthored with the economist Gabriel Zucman, who supports the California billionaire tax, did find that wealth taxes had not raised as much revenue as estimated in several European countries and became less popular as a result.<\/p>\n

Varaschin says this was because these taxes were levied on a larger set of the wealthy, which included homeowners or small businesses, rather than the ultra-rich or billionaires. The taxpayers could hardly afford to pay it, and the government made exemptions instead. These taxes also did not touch assets, where much of the wealth of the ultra-rich lies, Varaschin says.<\/p>\n

The California tax remedies this by taxing only billionaires and taxing assets, including shares in companies.<\/p>\n

Daniel Shaviro, Wayne Perry professor of taxation at New York University, says, \u201cTraditionally, these taxes can be hard to enforce because tax administration don\u2019t want to go after these people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even if it passes, \u201cThe governor could just say this is not a high priority for him and not enforce it,\u201d Shaviro says, referring to Governor Gavin Newsom, who has opposed the tax.<\/p>\n

But Primm says, \u201cThe governor is out of touch with Californians on this\u201d.<\/p>\n

Newsom is in the last year of his last term as governor. However, nearly all the candidates running for the June 2 primary for governor, except billionaire Tom Steyer, who is running as a progressive Democrat, also oppose this measure. While some have said this will lead to a flight of capital, others say the spending plan does not include expenses for education, which was not cut in the OBBBA.<\/p>\n

Greer Dove, who gets food through Calfresh and the San Francisco Marin Food Bank for herself and her daughter, says the looming food benefit cuts are worrying. \u201cThe anxiety of it all is adding up. I could be next.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"San Francisco, United States \u2013 Greer Dove\u2019s days are packed with studying business and finance, as well as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":635079,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,4868,101,3378,2402,3,111,47699,3733,21,19,22,20,25,1209,256475,24],"class_list":["post-635078","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-business-and-economy","tag-economy","tag-features","tag-inflation","tag-news","tag-politics","tag-poverty-and-development","tag-tax","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-us-canada","tag-us-midterm-elections-2026","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/635078","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=635078"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/635078\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/635079"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=635078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=635078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=635078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}