Billionaire Tax Officially Has Enough Signatures for California Ballot [View all]

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/18/us/california-billionaire-tax-ballot.html

Billionaire Tax Officially Has Enough Signatures for California Ballot
A proposed wealth tax on billionaires is headed to the ballot unless Gov. Gavin Newsom and other opponents reach a deal with backers to remove it.
By Soumya Karlamangla
June 18, 2026, 1:23 a.m. ET

A proposal to tax the wealth of billionaires in California has officially gathered enough signatures to appear on the November ballot, state officials announced on Wednesday.

It isn’t yet certain that the tax initiative will actually be voted on, however. Several prominent Californians, including Gov. Gavin Newsom, have vowed to defeat the measure, and they could strike a last-minute deal to remove it from voter consideration. Proponents have until June 25 to decide if they want to proceed with placing it on the ballot.

The California secretary of state, the top elections official, said Wednesday that her office verified that the labor union backing the proposal had collected more than enough signatures to clear the nearly 875,000 threshold to reach the ballot.

If the measure does move forward, there almost certainly will be an expensive election fight in California. It would pit the economic anxieties of working-class Californians against some of the state’s richest residents and business leaders, who say that such a tax would threaten California’s longstanding dominance in tech innovation. The measure would also face opposition from unlikely groups such as the California Teachers Association and the California Medical Association, which represents doctors.

The initiative would place a one-time, 5 percent tax on the assets of California residents with at least $1.1 billion and would dedicate most of the revenue to health care. (Those with between $1 billion and $1.1 billion would pay a lesser percentage.)

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