California Billionaire Tax Proposal Faces Opposition
Left 50%
Center 0%
Right 50%
1 left · 0 center · 1 right
What happened
California voters face a November 3 deadline on Proposition 40 (the Billionaire Tax Act), a ballot measure that would impose a one-time 5 percent tax on the net worth of residents worth more than $1 billion, sending 90 percent of the money to healthcare and the rest to education and food assistance. A September Public Policy Institute of California poll found 52 percent of likely voters in favor and 46 percent opposed. Supporters, including the SEIU United Healthcare Workers West union that put the measure on the ballot, Representative Ro Khanna, and Senator Bernie Sanders, have raised about $32.8 million; opponents—including Governor Gavin Newsom, Planned Parenthood’s California chapter, the California Teachers Association, most Republicans, and donors led by Google co-founder Sergey Brin—have raised more than $300 million and booked about $96 million in advertising versus $209,000 for the yes side. The tax would apply to billionaires living in California as of January 1, 2026; several, including Brin and fellow Google co-founder Larry Page, have already left, and the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office estimates a few hundred billionaires live in a state that relies on the top 1 percent of earners for nearly half of personal income-tax revenue.
Sourcing check · Fully on the record · 2 articles
1 of 1 article cites a named source for the story. It was on the record from the first report.
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- How it developed
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This is about who is cited, not whether the story is true. Each source below says what it names. How we count
Omitted — what each side leaves out
Unpacked
Left-leaning coverage never raises the constitutional objections that right-leaning coverage treats as able to void the tax after Election Day. Readers of ABC News get a ballot fight over money, party defections, and the risk that rich residents will leave, with no discussion of due process, the commerce clause, or retroactivity. Right-leaning coverage instead argues the measure imposes a "wholly new tax" based on a snapshot of residency that courts could strike down as a taking.
Left-leaning coverage leads with Democrats, Planned Parenthood, and the California Teachers Association joining billionaires on the no side. Right-leaning coverage leads with legality and never mentions that split inside the state's governing party.
What revenue would be left for healthcare if the levy passes and then is blocked in court?
Bottom line
ABC News covers Prop 40 as a money-and-migration fight and skips the 1998 takings case Daily Wire uses to argue a yes vote would not lock the tax in.
The receipts — 5 facts one side's coverage lacks
- In Eastern Enterprises v. Apfel (1998), the Supreme Court deemed an after-the-fact monetary obligation a severe retroactive burden and a takings-clause violation.
- Opponents of the measure have raised more than $300 million.
- 90% of the money would go toward funding healthcare.
- Taxpayers have the burden of proposing a more fair and reasonable valuation method that is practicable to administer.
- Opponents are backing a ballot proposal to ban new taxes on financial assets and other personal property, excluding real estate.
The Left View
Left-leaning coverage frames the measure as a first-in-the-nation test of taxing the ultra-rich’s investment wealth rather than wages alone. Sanders, the yes campaign’s principal messenger, asks whether Americans are “destined to live in an oligarchic society begging for crumbs while our economic and political lives are controlled by a handful of the wealthiest people on Earth,” and the union behind the measure says it is needed to replace an estimated $100 billion in federal healthcare funding cuts over five years. Ads warn that children make about 1.5 million emergency-room visits a year in California and urge voters to “join Bernie Sanders, tax the billionaires, stop California’s healthcare collapse.” Coverage notes that the state Democratic Party’s executive board endorsed the proposal despite the governor’s opposition, and cites Cornell sociologist Cristobal Young saying prior California tax increases on millionaires did not produce a mass exodus because “these really high-income folks—they’re already doing great, and they don’t need to move somewhere else.”
The Right View
Right-leaning coverage, including a Hoover Institution paper by Joshua Rauh and Aharon Friedman, calls the act “economic treachery masquerading as California’s fiscal policy” and a design to “confiscate” billionaire wealth. They argue that applying the tax to residency and wealth measured before the November vote is hard to reconcile with 14th Amendment due process, analogizing to the Supreme Court’s 1998 Eastern Enterprises v. Apfel holding of a “severe, disproportionate, and extremely retroactive burden,” and that a “wholly new tax” on worldwide net worth from a one-day California snapshot also violates the commerce clause, the takings clause, and the ban on bills of attainder by targeting a “politically disfavored group.” Valuation and credit rules, they write, are “dramatically skewed against taxpayers.” They say their research shows the act would decrease state revenue as major income-tax payers leave—taking economic activity with them—and that, “based on the Act’s provisions and its drafters’ statements,” raising revenue “isn’t even the primary motivation,” but rather imposing “economic harm,” reducing influence, or “intentionally driv[ing] them out.” They conclude it is “unconstitutional on its face.”
Our Take (balanced)
Supporters’ strongest argument is that a one-time levy on a small number of billionaires could replace large federal healthcare cuts, a claim given political weight by the state Democratic Party’s endorsement and by Young’s finding that earlier millionaire tax hikes did not cause a mass departure. Opponents’ strongest argument is that those same residents already supply a dominant share of income-tax receipts, so the departures already underway—plus a one-day worldwide-wealth design that Hoover scholars call a due-process and commerce-clause violation—could shrink rather than grow the fisc. The central unresolved tension is whether California can extract dedicated healthcare revenue from asset wealth that is mobile and legally contested, or whether those mobility and constitutional defects will negate the revenue the measure is written to raise.
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