Unveiled Today: The First Politically Viable Wealth Tax

[Passages]

Today on TAP: A proposed 2026 California ballot measure would tax billionaires’ fortunes to fund imperiled health access for 15 million state Medicaid recipients.

by Harold Meyerson
October 23, 2025

Earlier today, one of California’s most powerful unions and two of the nation’s most prominent progressive economists unveiled a 2026 state ballot measure that would establish the nation’s first wealth tax. In the course of their presentation, they offered a master class in how to structure such a tax in ways that disarm its opponents.

The union behind the proposal is SEIU’s United Healthcare Workers West, whose members work in hospitals and clinics across the state. The economists are UC Berkeley’s Emmanuel Saez (whose work with Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman has opened the portals to the study of great wealth) and his now retired Berkeley colleague Robert Reich (not strictly an economist but an economic-policy maven par excellence, as well as a former secretary of labor and a co-founder of this magazine).

The ballot measure they unveiled is an emergency billionaires’ tax aimed at making up the $100 million hit to California’s Medicaid program over the next five years that the Republican Congress and President Trump delivered by enacting their One Big Beautiful Bill that disproportionately cut taxes on the wealthy and reduced federal allotments for Medicaid. If it qualifies for the November 2026 ballot and is enacted by state voters, the initiative would levy a 5 percent tax on the wealth of the state’s roughly 200 billionaires and 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. (This latter provision likely ensures the support, or at least the neutrality, of the state’s teachers unions, which are accustomed to seeing schools getting 40 percent of any state tax increases.)

The stated purpose of this measure is to address what will surely be a crisis for many Medicaid recipients and the hospitals and clinics that treat them, where many of SEIU UHW’s members work. But its implications, at a time when the fortunes of the very wealthy are reaching stratospheric levels even as median incomes are largely stagnant and public funding is under attack, may have even greater significance. It comes at a time when proposals to hike taxes on the very rich (something that polls have long shown to be popular) are beginning to bubble up. In France, Saez’s frequent collaborator Gabriel Zucman has proposed a wealth tax to close the nation’s budget gap that the conservative government would like to diminish by reducing public services. In New York City, Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani wants 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 unsurprising objections from the very rich and those who love (or at least, work for) them: chiefly, that they will compel them to move elsewhere and deter their fellow plutocrats from moving in—even though the evidence for that actually happening is extremely scarce.

https://prospect.org/2025/10/23/unveiled-today-first-politically-viable-wealth-tax/

[in2herbs]

1. The USSC has taken the position of state's rights so are they going to be hands off? Also

can this formula be adopted by other states???

Bravo to the working class!!!!

[Old Testament Libera]

2. This is a terrific idea!

California is leading the resistance