You might be thinking, "Why, of course they did. They are Democrats, after all."
But actually, it is more than a little surprising that the California Democratic Party took this stand, because it is stabbing their financial base in the back and a threat to the organized crime ring that is at the heart of the Democratic Party in that state.
In other words, they chose ideological fealty to the growing socialist movement in the party over the self-interest of the political class, which ought to surprise you just a bit. Whatever they say, almost everybody in the Establishment is in it for themselves, not to create a socialist utopia.
There it is…
— Geiger Capital (@Geiger_Capital) August 3, 2026
California's Democratic Party has voted to endorse the billionaire wealth tax on the ballot.
If it passes, anyone with a net worth of $1B+ will have to give 5% of their assets to the state. pic.twitter.com/eQJjtVBwRh
Both Gavin Newsom and Xavier Becerra had come out against the tax, arguing that perhaps a national billionaire tax would be a good thing, but one focused solely on California would be a competitive disadvantage.
That's an understatement, of course. The tech industry is driven by venture capital, and successful companies have meteoric growth. If you punish people for striking it rich, they'll go elsewhere. Think what happened when Delaware suddenly turned on Elon Musk—not only did he change the state in which he incorporated, but a flood of other companies decided it was too risky to incorporate there, and waved the state goodbye.
At a weekend meeting of hundreds of party officials, the tax proposal on Sunday cleared the 60% threshold needed to overcome objections and win the endorsement, according to a party spokeswoman. California voters will decide whether to approve or reject the ballot initiative in November. If it takes effect, the state’s roughly 200 billionaires would pay a 5%, one-time levy.
The support of state Democratic officials gives the proposed levy a public-relations boost that was far from assured. The tax has sharply divided the party establishment, with Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra publicly opposed to it.
The proposal was initiated by a large healthcare union. Several billionaires and some other unions opposed the tax. Both sides mounted fierce lobbying campaigns to sway executive board members at the state Democrats’ meeting this weekend.
“This endorsement puts to rest the idea that California Democrats are not united by the billionaire tax—they are,” said Dave Regan, president of the Service Employees International Union United Healthcare Workers West, which proposed the initiative.
Independent polling has shown a strong majority of Democratic voters in California and a narrower majority of the broader electorate support the tax. The SEIU-UHW proposed the tax to try to raise $100 billion aimed mostly at offsetting the Trump administration’s deep healthcare funding cuts.
The "Billionaire tax" is not an income tax; it is an asset seizure. Nobody has a billion dollars in the bank, including most large corporations. They reinvest the money or have it tied up in assets, and almost everybody who falls into the category "billionaire" is actually just a stockholder in a company they built or helped build. The goal is to take away partial ownership of the companies these people control.
In ordinary terms, that is called "seizing the means of production," or something close to it. While the state is just trying to steal the money, not the company, it's about the same thing as how a death tax forces family members to sell the farm or business to pay off the government cut.
Newsom, a Democrat seen as a potential 2028 presidential candidate, has argued that the levy could push the state’s largest taxpayers to flee. Other opponents include the California Teachers Association and California Professional Firefighters.
After the tax initiative qualified for the ballot in June, the governor and his allies fought to persuade the SEIU-UHW to withdraw it. The union at one point offered to withdraw the proposal in exchange for Newsom backing a smaller wealth tax.
The tax would apply to people who resided in California as of Jan. 1 of this year and who have a net worth of $1 billion or more at the end of this year. A person’s net worth excludes certain assets, such as real estate they own directly, for purposes of the tax.
Members of the California Democratic Party’s roughly 380-member executive board gathered this weekend in San Diego to consider various proposals on the November ballot.
In a sign of how divisive the proposal has become in California, opponents and advocates scrambled to whip votes at a waterside Sheraton hotel near the airport.
The SEIU pushed to get the proposal onto the ballot, and for those of you who don't know, the SEIU is basically the communist party in the shape of a union. Their power over the Democrats is their ability to mobilize their own members and their relationships with radical NGOs. The Organized Crime Democrats have benefited from their organizing ability, but as with the DSA, their loyalty is to the ideology, not the OCDs.
The Democratic Party thought they were using the SEIU, not realizing that as they gained power, the roles would reverse.
Already, six prominent billionaires have left the state in anticipation of the passage of the tax, or just in disgust that they were put at risk. If they had stayed, they would have been $27 billion lighter in assets. Elon Musk famously left California before the tax was proposed, disgusted by how unfriendly the state was.
A California Assemblywoman tweeted out her hatred for Elon, and he took her seriously.
Message received
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 11, 2020
No more income tax from Elon. That was a bit of a mistake, looking back.
Unfortunately for the billionaires who decided to stick it out, hoping that the measure wouldn't get on the ballot—if the measure passes, anybody who was a resident on January 1, 2026 would be subject to the tax—they are likely to lose that bet.
They will have to fight the battle in the courts, where the measure will face some interesting challenges.
At least these people can afford to get some extraordinarily good lawyers.
As Ro Khanna shows, once you go down the path of asset seizures, the limits to who gets taxed become remarkably fluid. He has already proposed that the asset limit should drop to $50 million, or only 5% of the proposed limit in the current measure. After all, there aren't that many billionaires, but in California there are, according to Google, tens of thousands of "ultra-high-net-worth individuals." That's a lot of cash.
It will be interesting to see if the Democratic Party takes a hit from this endorsement. It had to choose between its financial base and its ideological base, and chose the Bolsheviks.
Editor's Note: The Democrat Party has never been less popular as voters reject its globalist agenda.
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