In California, a proposed law drafted by organized labor would impose a one-time tax on all the state's billionaires, equal to some portion of their total worth. Those whose net worth exceeds $1.1 billion would pay around five percent; five percent of $1.1 billion is $55 million, which would leave those Californians with a mere $1.045 billion in personal net worth. Those whose net worths fall between $1 billion and $1.1 billion would pay a lesser percentage of their wealth.
The proposal is called the "2026 Billionaire Tax Act," and while it could potentially generate some gigantic sum of money for the state of California, anyone capable of some basic math, and of even vaguely conceiving of how much money a billion dollars is, can see that it would not meaningfully deplete even those paupers whose personal net worth sits at a mere $1 billion. Those affected by the tax would be able to spread their payment over five years, beginning in 2027, in case any of these individuals whose personal wealth exceeds that of some island nations find themselves illiquid at the moment.
Among the proposal's opponents—including, of course, many billionaires, who reportedly have already begun planning their exits from the state in anticipation of a tax that may very well never come to pass—is California governor Gavin Newsom, who has boasted of working against its passage behind the scenes, and has promised to defeat the initiative should it ever reach his desk, where he could bring its passage into law to an end simply by refusing to sign it. (He can be bypassed in theory by putting the proposal to voters as a direct ballot initiative.) The Democrat, widely understood to have his sights set on the party's 2028 presidential nomination, has fought off taxes on extreme wealth at least twice before in his term, despite their strong popularity among residents of the state.
Newsom's stated reasoning for killing these attempts at very modest one-time wealth redistribution is that they will drive the mega-rich out of the state, which reportedly boasts more billionaires than any other. If the billionaires leave, the thinking goes, they will take their tax dollars with them; also their departure will, in the New York Times's phrasing, "stifle innovation in California" by damaging the state's tech industry. Here one might be tempted to look for the usual bleak hidden motives whenever a politician opposes something popular among their own constituents—He's protecting his donors! He's in the pocket of Big Tech!—but in this case the work isn't even necessary. Newsom's stated reasons are bad enough on their own, a stinking bolus of exhausted Third Way bullshit that explicitly treats the state's richest scumbags as resources—of tax revenue, of innovation, of job creation—rather than as the sucking leeches they are.
Newsom's vocal and forceful opposition to the billionaire tax is a thing to keep in mind when you read about his Thursday stunt. Speaking at the Davos World Economic Forum, Newsom displayed a set of red knee-pads bearing a mock-up of Donald Trump's signature; they are, he said, for world leaders, university heads, and "yes, many corporate leaders [who] are selling out" to the Trump administration.
"I can't take this complicity of people rolling over," Newsom said.
This, even more than his calculated right turn to transphobia, making a photo-op out of clearing homeless encampments, or paling around with right-wing roadkill Ben Shapiro on a podcast, is perhaps the purest imaginable distillation of Newsom, the man, and of the exhausted, discredited, view-from-nowhere centrism he represents. Lacking any systemic critique of America's broken politics, unwilling or ideologically incapable of situating Trump within America's much larger problems of wealth concentration and institutional rot, he gives material protection to an unaccountable, malevolent class of hyper-rich parasites with one hand, and makes an empty, theatrical, cornily homophobic gesture at attacking those same parasites with the other. Rolling over to Trump, the uniquely bad ogre who emerged from nothing and has no causes, is bad and shameful (and gay); rolling over to Trump's peers in California, who share all of his goals but perhaps pursue them less crudely (like, for example, by donating huge sums of money to the effort to make him president of the United States) is smart and good.
You might think that a guy once pictured draped languidly on a rug with Kimberly Guilfoyle is uniquely unsuited to making jokes about other people's sexual humiliation. You would be correct. More to the point, the common thread between Newsom's opposition to the extreme wealth taxes and his corny Davos Carrot Top prop-comic act—dressing up what's essentially a plea for intervention as an Epic Bacon burn—is his conviction that the rich and powerful will always have a monopoly on agency in our world. That nothing about the obscene distribution of power in American society can or should be changed, but that perhaps its holders can be entreated to use it differently. It's infantile, for one thing, but more importantly it does not differ in any meaningful way from Donald Trump's basic ideas about the world.
The kneepads are for sale on Newsom's website, for a hundred bucks a pair.
