As California voters head to the polls this November, their vote on whether to enact a first-of-its-kind billionaire wealth tax may mark "a turning point in the battle between democracy and oligarchy," says a group of Nobel Prize-winning economists. The fight over Proposition 40—a ballot measure that would impose a one-time 5% tax on the…
Page F2From§Eachthe early evening edition — 25 September 2026
Billionaires put two rival tax measures on the ballot; the tax on billionaires is now a dead heat
As it ran on the front
Three ways to tax a billionaire sit on that ballot, and you are handed one vote to spend. Two of the three were put there by the campaign the billionaires fund. They need not pass. They need only stand beside the one that might and carry off a slice of the Yes — a slice only — because an initiative is not merely a proposal; it is a position on a ballot, and a position on a ballot divides.
Proposition 40 is a one-time five percent tax on the net worth of anyone holding a billion dollars or more. Two hundred such residents, in California. The money funds the state's healthcare system.…
…(cont) On the sixteenth, majority support. On the twenty-first, fifty-two percent, with a group of Nobel Prize-winning economists saying the vote may mark "a turning point in the battle between democracy and oligarchy." On the twenty-second, a different survey — Berkeley's Citrin Center, with POLITICO — forty-five percent of registered voters. Forty-five.
And yesterday? Tightening dramatically, weeks from the vote. A near-dead heat.
You would want someone to have broken a rule here. Nobody did. Quite legal, quite public, handsomely done: the ballot is open to whoever can pay to enter it ... and it has been entered.
By the fence the fox sits. The hens are counted. Not yet.
“Nobody had to beat this thing on the merits — they just crowded the aisle with two more versions of it so your one vote has three places to go and none of them get there. Two hundred people in that state are worth a billion or more, the five percent was supposed to fund healthcare, and the cheapest way to keep it was to buy a spot on the same ballot. Fifty-two on the twenty-first, forty-five in the next poll, dead heat now, and not one line of that required breaking a single rule.”
“Look, more choices on a ballot is more democracy — did I say that? That doesn't sound like me, I said voters are sophisticated. And the polling is moving because Californians looked at a wealth levy and thought it through, which is, that's not splitting anything, that's deliberation. Nobody is telling anyone how to vote on three measures. Three is just what qualified.”
Earlier in this story
- Billionaire-backed group puts two more billionaire taxes on the California ballot, splitting the Yes three ways By Sterling · the early bird edition, 25 September 2026
The receipts
California's state ballot measure proposing a 5 percent tax on the state's 200 billionaires' net worth is losing support, according to a new poll released Monday. The University of California, Berkeley Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research-POLITICO poll found that 45 percent of registered California voters support the ballot measure…
California’s explosive billionaire tax battle is tightening dramatically just weeks before voters decide whether to slap the state’s wealthiest residents with a one-time 5% levy on their fortunes.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.