A proposed 2026 California ballot measure would tax billionaires’ fortunes to fund imperiled health access for 15 million state Medicaid recipients.View this email in your browser [link removed]

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**Unveiled today: The first politically viable wealth tax**

**A proposed 2026 California ballot measure would tax billionaires’ fortunes to fund imperiled health access for 15 million state Medicaid recipients.**

Earlier today, one of California’s most powerful unions and two of the nation’s most prominent progressive economists unveiled a 2026 state ballot measure that would establish the nation’s first wealth tax. In the course of their presentation, they offered a master class in how to structure such a tax in ways that disarm its opponents.

The union behind the proposal is SEIU’s United Healthcare Workers West, whose members work in hospitals and clinics across the state. The economists are UC Berkeley’s Emmanuel Saez (whose work with Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman has opened the portals to the study of great wealth) and his now retired Berkeley colleague Robert Reich (not strictly an economist but an economic-policy maven par excellence, as well as a former secretary of labor and a co-founder of this magazine).

The ballot measure they unveiled is an emergency billionaires’ tax aimed at making up the $100 million hit to California’s Medicaid program over the next five years that the Republican Congress and President Trump delivered by enacting their One Big Beautiful Bill that disproportionately cut taxes on the wealthy and reduced federal allotments for Medicaid. If it qualifies for the November 2026 ballot and is enacted by state voters, the initiative would levy a 5 percent tax on the wealth of the state’s roughly 200 billionaires and direct 90 percent of those funds to California’s Medicaid recipients and the institutions that serve them, with the remaining 10 percent going to the state’s K-12 schools. (This latter provision likely ensures the support, or at least the neutrality, of the state’s teachers unions, which are accustomed to seeing schools getting 40 percent of any state tax increases.)

The stated purpose of this measure is to address what will surely be a crisis for many Medicaid recipients and the hospitals and clinics that treat them, where many of SEIU UHW’s members work. But its implications, at a time when the fortunes of the very wealthy are reaching stratospheric levels even as median incomes are largely stagnant and public funding is under attack, may have even greater significance. It comes at a time when proposals to hike taxes on the very rich (something that polls have long shown to be popular) are beginning to bubble up. In France, Saez’s frequent collaborator Gabriel Zucman has proposed a wealth tax to close the nation’s budget gap that the conservative government would like to diminish by reducing public services. In New York City, Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani wants to raise the income taxes of residents with annual incomes in excess of $1 million by 2 percent in order to fund universal child care. Such proposals have raised unsurprising objections from the very rich and those who love (or at least, work for) them: chiefly, that they will compel them to move elsewhere and deter their fellow plutocrats from moving in—even though the **evidence** [link removed] for that actually happening is extremely scarce.

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The California proposal neatly avoids such eventualities. First, it is a one-time-only tax, to be levied exclusively on billionaires’ current (i.e., 2025) net worth. Even if they move to Tasmania, they will still be liable for 5 percent of this year’s net worth. Moreover, they can stretch out their payments over the next five years, though their payments will still be based just on their 2025 wealth.

During today’s press conference, Saez noted that the billionaires’ average yearly income has been rising by 7.5 percent (as against the 1.5 percent for median-income residents), so that they will still be growing wealthier even after that 5 percent tax is factored in. Saez added that about 72 percent of the billionaires’ wealth is in their ownership of publicly traded stock, so those sums are readily calculable (there are Swiss and Swedish models for calculating the value of privately held enterprises). As with their payment of income taxes, the billionaires will file their wealth taxes themselves in 2027, assuming the measure is enacted the previous November, based on their net worth in 2025. The state can audit those returns if its estimates of their fortunes are significantly at variance with those filings.

Crucially, the tax won’t crimp the fortunes of any billionaire who moves into the state next year or any later year, as it only applies to the billionaires living in the state this year. Therefore, the objections lodged against both the Mamdani and the Zucman taxes—the horrific specter of billionaire flight—can’t be levied against the California proposal. That’s not to say the proposal won’t be attacked as socialistic, of course. But by directing the funds the measure would yield to the 15 million Californians on Medi-Cal (the state’s version of Medicaid) at a time when their access to health care is on the brink of being either reduced or eliminated due to the cutbacks imposed by Trump and congressional Republicans, who redirected those funds to massive tax cuts for the rich, the measure’s sponsors can be reasonably confident that state voters will enact it. (They have until June to collect the required number of valid signatures—roughly 874,000—to place it on the November 2026 ballot.)

The spillover effects of its presence on the midterm-election ballot should be considerable. Democratic candidates, I suspect, will endorse it enthusiastically; conservative billionaires seeking public office, which could well include gubernatorial hopeful Rick Caruso, may find themselves compelled to support it. Democrats in states and cities that are also home to the very rich may well opt to enact similar proposals, whether through legislation or at the ballot box.

As Saez noted, the carefully devised limitations on the California initiative—confining its applicability to just 200 taxpayers and its time frame to a one-and-done one-year assessment—mean that it doesn’t address the metastatic growth of economic inequality as such. It certainly does nothing to restore the highest-bracket income tax rate of 91 percent reached during the presidency of socialist (well, Republican) Dwight Eisenhower, during whose 1950s tenure the wealth and income of ordinary Americans saw record increases. Nonetheless, it opens the door to further efforts to rein in the current redistribution of income and wealth to the very, sometimes obscenely, rich—efforts that are essential to preserving democracy.

**– HAROLD MEYERSON**

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