California's governor, Gavin Newsom, called for a national "billionaires tax" on Friday as he fights a ballot measure targeting the ultra-wealthy in his home state. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing The Guardian.
Newsom, who is expected to run for president in 2028, published his proposal the day after California officials certified a ballot measure to levy a one-time 5% tax on residents worth more than $1bn. The initiative, called the California Billionaire Tax Act, was brought by the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW) and would fund the state's healthcare, education and food assistance programs.
The initiative received more than 1.6m signatures – one of the highest in California history and something organizers point to as testament to the ballot measure's popularity. But it also spurred intense pushback from some of the state's richest Silicon Valley residents as well as several other prominent labor unions.
"The dangerous wealth tax directly threatens vital funding for education and schools, healthcare and clinics, public safety, and infrastructure projects by making California's revenue even more volatile," a coalition of unions including the California Medical Association, California Primary Care Association and the California School Boards Association said in a joint statement on Thursday.
Newsom also strongly opposes the measure, arguing it will hurt the state's economy. In his Substack post on Friday, Newsom expanded on his opposition and framed it as an ineffective solution. "I understand the anxiety driving the wealth tax proposal in California. But I'm voting no because this measure dedicates almost all of the revenue it raises to a single category of state spending," Newsom wrote.
Newsom argued that a state-level billionaire tax would be easily dodged by wealthy people who are able to move their assets to other states. Already, a handful of billionaires, including Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, have either threatened to leave California or moved out of the state. "You may not be able to pick up and move to Texas or Florida to shelter your income from taxation, but I promise you that billionaires can, and do," Newsom wrote. "Wealth is movable, and it shops for the state with the lowest taxes. The fight belongs at the federal level, where this broken system was created in the first place."
The governor has drawn a sharp divide with Ro Khanna, a democratic California congressman who has fully endorsed the ballot measure. During a press conference on Friday, Khanna delivered a stark rebuke to Newsom's announcement, saying he was surprised at how the governor has become "the face and the cheerleader" for the efforts to kill California's ballot measure initiative. Khanna said Newsom's claims that billionaires will flee the state is complete "hogwash". "The first quarter of 2026 had the most venture capital coming into California than ever before," Khanna said. "There's more investment in California now, not less."
In his Friday announcement, Newsom offered a counterproposal, a new national tax policy, rather than a state-by-state system. He proposed a minimum tax on anyone with a net worth above $100m. He also wants to make it illegal for the wealthy to borrow against their stock portfolios to fund their luxury lifestyles tax-free. He also said the US government should own a stake in artificial intelligence companies, a policy that Vermont senator Bernie Sanders has also advocated for in recent months. Newsom said there should be new rules for inheritance taxes, warning that "the transfer of wealth among the ultra-wealthy will lock in a permanent American aristocracy of inherited wealth". And he wants to raise corporate tax rates to where they were before Donald Trump's first-term tax cut.
"We need to ensure every American owns a stake in the future being built by AI through a national public equity fund that takes a major stake in the new economy," he wrote. "Simply, as artificial intelligence reshapes the country, every American should own a piece of the future it builds." He said the revenue generated by his proposals could be used to retrain workers, fund universal childcare, make college free and increase funding for healthcare.
While Newsom's proposals echo longstanding talking points of the Democratic party's populist left with arguments that urgent changes are needed to prevent the elite concentration of wealth and power from undermining democracy, he stopped short of endorsing the types of federal wealth taxes long proposed by Sanders and Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren. During his press conference on Friday, Khanna called Newsom's proposal toothless and said it catered to lower-level taxes that the tech industry and wealthy elite support. He also indicated that if Newsom genuinely believes in a federal billionaire tax, he should support the California ballot measure too – which is up for a vote in the near-future and could help push forward national legislation. "Voters, especially those under 45, can sniff out propaganda," Khanna said. "The proposal is exactly what the tech lords have been suggesting … People want folks who are going to stand up to the billionaires and the trillionaires."