Deep Inside the Chaotic Politics of the California Billionaire Tax
Out here in California, Democracy is a monthslong slog. The state effectively began engaging in big-D Democracy sometime around January—that’s when California’s ballot measures were gathering signatures. Every time you went to Ralphs or Vons, you could linger outside in the perpetual sunshine, pick up a box of Girl Scout cookies—and scribble your signature onto the latest ballot initiative. The people gathering those signatures are often gig workers, paid for each John Hancock they wrangle. They carry around armfuls of paper (usually collecting signatures for four or five ballot initiatives at once), and they’ve learned to lead with the most popular measures. A Californian hurrying through a milk run won’t always stop when asked to sign your petition to create an immunology research institute at the state university, but they might stop if you ask them to sign on to an easy-to-explain and broadly popular initiative like Voter ID or Prohibiting New Retirement Taxes. Their ears may especially perk up when they hear the signature hustlers mention this year’s billionaire tax.“Have you signed the billionaire tax yet?” was a popular refrain outside my local Ralphs. They’d buttonhole you with that or with the ballot measure prohibiting new retirement taxes, which sounded just as simple until you asked to see the language. I remember reading the retirement tax initiative and feeling uncomfortable; it was too wishy-washy. What’s this here about prohibiting new taxes on the worldwide value of my intellectual property? Are California’s firefighters and nurses really at risk of retroactive taxes on the future value of their 401(k)? I had the curious sensation that I was being astroturfed. Turns out, I was. The Retirement and Personal Savings Protection Act is one of six billionaire-backed measures, three of which are aimed at defanging the billionaire tax. All these measures are funded by Building a Better California, the $80 million nonprofit bankrolled by Google founder Sergey Brin, who has thrown a $40 million tantrum over the notion that he may have to pay the billionaire tax. A spokesperson for Building a Better California didn’t want to speak on the record, but Brin’s been telling the governor and every reporter who’ll listen that he’s leaving California and taking his toys with him. Why, he’s even threatening to move the company that manages his 466-foot-long superyacht out of the Golden State, per The New York Times. There’s a dystopian (and distinctly American) paradigm on display here, a scene akin to performance art: Gig workers sweating outside grocery stores, collecting signatures to keep billionaires from paying taxes. Those same billionaires insist they’d rather leave than pitch in to help keep afloat the system within which they built their empires. Sergey Brin built Google while on a taxpayer-funded grant from the National Science Foundation. Those grants, of course, have been slashed in the Trump era. Now that Brin has reached the top, he’s pulling the rope up after him, throwing his hissy fit from a ritzy hideaway somewhere in Nevada, presumably Lake Tahoe. But chances are—unless his ballot initiatives pass and/or he wins the lawsuits that will inevitably follow—Brin is going to have to pay the billionaire tax. (Who knows how much, but you might ballpark it at about 15 of his $240 billion.)“If it were so easy just to get a Nevada driver’s license or put your assets in the Cayman Islands, would the billionaires be this agitated?” asks Darien Shanske, the UC Davis tax law professor who helped write this year’s billionaire tax. Shanske told The New Republic that he began working on a wealth tax during the pandemic in 2020, but that it became an emergency after Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill cut nearly $1 trillion from health care assistance to low-income families, driving a hole into California’s budget. It’s no coincidence, he notes, that the billionaire tax’s signature-gathering effort is funded by the health care workers’ union, SEIU-UHW. Shanske was recruited into the effort by David Gamage, a University of Missouri tax law professor who advised Senator Elizabeth Warren on her wealth tax policy when she was running for president. Gamage says that he, Shanske, and two other law professors—Brian Galle and Emmanuel Saez, both of UC Berkley—worked on “several rounds of wealth tax proposals.” At first, it seemed like the California Teachers Association might put the billionaire tax on the ballot, but when that fell through SEIU-UHW picked it up. The Teachers Association is now backing a permanent structuring of Proposition 30—the 2012 referendum taxing high earners that has pumped nearly $100 billion into the state’s education system—so, technically, there are two wealth taxes jockeying for the ballot this year in California.
