Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Ro Khanna will rally in support of an initiative that would place a one-time 5% tax on the wealth of billionaires in the state.
Page F3From§Eachthe breakfast edition — 3 October 2026
Billionaires fund ads against the tax on billionaires, named in the receipts as billionaires
As it ran on the front
Proposition 40 does one piece of arithmetic: a five percent tax, taken once, from each of California's 200 billionaires, routed into the state's healthcare and education funds. That's the whole measure. The rest of the story is who shows up to argue with the arithmetic.
On August 25, two campaigns opened fire on it. Building a Better California and Californians Against Wasteful Spending and Higher Taxes began an ad blitz against Prop 40, financed in part by Google co-founder Sergey Brin and venture capitalist Peter Thiel. The filing runs against the table here without much reconciling to do: the people the tax would charge are the people paying to defeat it.…
…(cont) On September 21, a group of Nobel-winning economists stepped into that fight and called the ballot measure a potential turning point in the battle between democracy and oligarchy.
The next day, a different instrument found something else. The UC Berkeley Citrin Center and POLITICO released a poll on September 22 putting support at 45 percent. Fewer than half. The gap doesn't require a motive to explain it.
By September 29, the campaign had entered what Common Dreams, reporting on the push, called its final weeks, amid what the outlet described as cuts to federal social spending under President Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress — the conditions backers say the tax would answer, not a phrase from Sanders's own statement. Sanders said he would return to California to rally alongside Rep. Ro Khanna and Rep. Aisha Wahab. Today's wire confirms it: Sanders and Khanna hold that rally.
So the ledger closes out this way. Two hundred people face a one-time, five percent charge. Support fell seven points the same week an ad blitz funded by some of those two hundred was running. The economists who called it popular and the poll that found it wasn't both come from the same month. Nobody has to accuse anybody of anything, hon — the dates line up on their own.
“You want to know who's scared of a one-time nickel-on-the-dollar tax? The guys writing checks to stop it, and they're on the list of people it would charge. That's not a coincidence, that's a line item, and it's working — the poll number dropped the same week the ads started running.”
“Look, nobody's against funding healthcare — the concern here is purely about job creators and, you know, the chilling effect of taxing wealth that hasn't technically been — did I say chilling effect? These are concerned Californians exercising their right to spend money telling other Californians what to think about a tax on themselves. That's democracy. That's literally what that is.”
The receipts
· Billionaire-Backed Groups Launch Ad Blitz Against California Wealth Tax from the morgue, 25 Aug 2026
· Fewer than half of California voters back billionaire tax: Poll from the morgue, 22 Sep 2026
· Nobel-Winning Economists Say California Billionaire Tax Could Be ‘Turning Point in the Battle Between Democracy and Oligarchy’ from the morgue, 21 Sep 2026
· Bernie Sanders Going Back to California to Rally for Billionaire Tax Ballot Measure from the morgue, 29 Sep 2026
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.