They spend more than they pay

I recently joined with one of California’s most powerful unions (SEIU’s United Healthcare Workers West, whose members work in hospitals and clinics across the state) and one of the nation’s most respected economists (Berkeley’s Emmanuel Saez) to unveil a 2026 California state ballot measure that would establish the nation’s first wealth tax.

It’s an emergency tax on billionaires, to make up for the $100 million hit to California’s Medicaid program that Trump and his Republican Congress made in their One Big Beautiful (big ugly) bill. That bill, you’ll recall, cut taxes mainly for the wealthy and paid for it by reducing federal appropriations for Medicaid.

If the measure qualifies for the November 2026 ballot and were to be enacted by California voters, it would levy a 5 percent tax on the wealth of the state’s roughly 200 billionaires. It would 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).

Its purpose is to address what would otherwise be a crisis for many Medicaid recipients and the hospitals and clinics that treat them.

Yet the measure could have much broader implications for America, at a time when the fortunes of the ultra wealthy have reached the stratosphere while median incomes are stagnant and public funding is shrinking.

Indeed, proposals to raise taxes on the ultra wealthy to finance what average working people need are emerging in several places — most notably in New York City, where Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani (who may be elected the city’s next mayor tomorrow) aims 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 predictable outrage from the rich, along with threats that they’ll move elsewhere where taxes are lower and dire predictions that their fellow plutocrats will refuse to move in.

Yet there’s scant evidence for these consequences. In fact, when Massachusetts passed a “millionaires tax” in 2023, conservatives claimed the rich would flee. But two years later, they haven’t — and Massachusetts has collected $5.7 billion for infrastructure and public education.