The California Billionaire Tax’s Ever-Shifting Goalposts

We were promised it was a modest idea. By passing a one-time taxA tax is a mandatory payment or charge collected by local, state, and national governments from individuals or businesses to cover the costs of general government services, goods, and activities., targeted at just the highest earners in California, the state could fill some budget gaps for health care programs and schools.

But economists have been sounding the alarm that punitive measures like these are never as simple as they appear. And the very ones driving this tax hike are proving their point.

Take Gabriel Zucman, one of the key advocates of the ballot measure. He described the amendment in a September interview as “a one-time tax on billionaires.” And he assured readers in an op-ed for The New York Times that a tax like this wasn’t an attempt to “fix” all of California’s problems.