The Battle to Enact a Billionaire’s Tax In California

The fury of ordinary people over the plutocratic enablers of Trumpism is driving the issue forward—but it’s still a rocky road ahead.

When the Los Angeles chapter of 50501, one of the loosely organized groups behind the No Kings marches against President Trump over the past year, heard about a proposed initiative to tax Californian billionaires, its volunteer members quickly signed up to help get the measure on the November ballot. The idea of a wealth tax wasn’t new to many activists, but the timing was right. Hunter Dunn, a 50501 member, said he’s noticed a change in the way his colleagues have talked about taxing the rich in the past few years. Instead of using the slogan that billionaires should pay “their fair share,” people use a more open-ended call: “Make billionaires pay.” That shift might seem subtle, but there’s an important distinction: Only the latter implies punishment.

“[The billionaires] went too far supporting the American Gestapo,” Dunn said. “They went too far actively bowing down to Trump and donating him money for destroying the ballroom, and then there were many, many, many of them directly referenced and associated with [Jeffrey] Epstein and [Ghislaine] Maxwell, child sex traffickers…. They’re not just sitting at a table with an alleged Nazi. They’re sitting at a table with an alleged predator, sex trafficker, and pedophile as well. And the American people do not want that table to exist anymore.”

At first, the tie between Epstein, who died in prison in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges, and a California ballot initiative isn’t obvious. But when viewed as part of the ever increasing anger at America’s elite and the role they play in supporting the Trump administration, it makes more sense. Taxing billionaires has been popular with voters since Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, who supports the California proposal, proposed it in their 2020 campaigns for president, but legislators haven’t answered the call. This year, California voters may be taking the matter into their own hands—and the proposal, no matter how imperfect, may ride the growing tide of left-wing populism to passage in the November elections.

Diego Marquez, a 38-year-old optician who collects signatures for the proposal near his home in downtown L.A., says a lot of the voters he speaks with also mention Epstein. They want to “screw the billionaires,” he said. “A lot of people are fed up.”

The proposed initiative is sponsored by the United Healthcare Workers West, a chapter of the Service Employee’s International Union, which began collecting signatures in January. The measure would implement a one-time tax of 5 percent for any legal California resident with assets over $1 billion in 2026. To land on the state’s typically proposal-heavy ballot, the campaign must gather enough signatures to equal 5 percent of the total votes cast in the last gubernatorial election—so about 875,000........

© New Republic