A Wealth Tax that Will Work
ROBERT REICH — How we build a better future despite Trump and his Republican lapdogs (Part 1)
Friends,
We don’t have to rely on the federal government — which remains shuttered, whose Republican-controlled Congress remains dysfunctional, whose Supreme Court emits elusive mutterings from its shadow docket, and whose president is nuts — to advance a progressive agenda. Several states are taking up the baton.
Case in point: I recently joined with one of California’s most powerful unions (SEIU’s United Healthcare Workers West, whose members work in hospitals and clinics across the state) and one of the nation’s most respected economists (Berkeley’s Emmanuel Saez) to unveil a 2026 California state ballot measure that would establish the nation’s first wealth tax.
It’s an emergency tax on billionaires, to make up for the $100 million hit to California’s Medicaid program that Trump and his Republican Congress made in their One Big Beautiful (big ugly) bill. That bill, you’ll recall, cut taxes mainly for the wealthy and paid for it by reducing federal appropriations for Medicaid.