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.