Even Jensen Huang Says Tax Him. California Just Made It Real.

A billionaire tax just qualified for the November ballot — and an Nvidia billionaire is already telling his friends to move to California. Shuster on the heresy of the year.

By David Shuster

California’s billionaires are freaking out.

Like most other obscenely wealthy Americans in this Trump era, the plutocrats have been bloated with paper wealth, fortified by legions of accountants, and possess a moral philosophy that rarely extends beyond their own reflection. They hold to the illusion that their fortunes are entirely their own. But, more than 1.5 million California voters have a different view and have now signed a petition pushing forward a ballot initiative that would impose a billionaire tax.

The California proposal is disarmingly simple: If voters approve the initiative this November, the state will impose a a one-time levy of roughly 5 percent on the swollen fortunes of those whose wealth has passed the billion-dollar mark. The proceeds will be directed largely towards health care, food assistance, and the assorted necessities of a functioning civilization.

Naturally, the oligarchs oppose this measure and have reacted as though Attila were again at the gates.

The conservatives insist that the wealthy will flee California, as though the billionaires were a herd of delicate gazelles rather than the most resourceful economic animals ever to roam the continent. The conservatives warn that California’s prosperity will evaporate overnight, that Silicon Valley will become a ghost town, that the sun itself may dim in protest.

The arguments would be comical if they were not so familiar: every modest attempt to pry a coin from the clenched fist of immense wealth is viewed, at least by the GOP, as the prelude to Armageddon.

But let’s take a closer look at this hysteria with the cold eye of reason—or at least with something approaching it.

First, the tax is not an annual scourge but a one-time impost, a fleeting inconvenience to people whose balance sheets resemble the GDP of minor nations. The notion that such figures—who have already demonstrated a supernatural tolerance for risk, volatility, and the occasional market catastrophe—will be undone by a single 5 percent trim is, to put it delicately, bull shit.

Secondly, the revenue is not destined for some bacchanal of bureaucratic indulgence but for health care, education, and feeding the hungry —those dreary, unglamorous pillars upon which any halfway civilized society rests.

If you believe, as most of us do, that that government exists to secure the general welfare, then this tax is not confiscation but good housekeeping.

Third—and here we approach the heart of the matter—is the opposition’s moral argument. The billionaire, we are asked to believe, is a creature of such delicate genius that to tax such a person is to imperil the very engine of progress. Yet the same billionaire has flourished under a system of laws, courts, infrastructure, and public investments that he or she did not personally finance.

The billionaires have driven on roads they did not pave, educated their workforce in schools they did not endow, and enforced contracts in courts they did not build. To suggest that a billionaire owes society absolutely nothing special is sickening. Relatedly, the objection to the tax seems not about economics but about theology. There is an old American capitalist superstition that great wealth is a sign of divine favor, and that to touch it—even lightly—is a species of blasphemy. Under this creed, the billionaire is not merely rich; the billionaire is consecrated. And the billionaire’s fortune is sacrosanct.

Thankfully, California voters appear ready to commit a small heresy.

To get on the fall ballot, the billionaire tax initiative required 875,000 signatures. It now has twice that many and counting. Because at least in California, and perhaps elsewhere, the public is not entirely enamored with oligarchy.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D., Calif.) have embraced the California proposal and are pushing a federal billionaire tax as well. But that federal proposal is a column for a different day.

California, which is a trend setter for the rest of the nation, has taken the lead. And it should be noted that not all billionaires are against the proposal. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang says he is “perfectly fine” with the proposed tax and recently encouraged other billionaires to move to California.

The state’s billionaire tax, if approved, will come at a crucial time. The Medicaid cuts in the Trump/GOP tax and spending bill from 2025 will take effect after the midterm elections. In California, as in all other states, the “big, beautiful bill” will mean lost healthcare jobs in 2027, sicker residents, and higher premiums unless funding gaps are filled.

Relatedly, the billionaire tax did not start as a statement about rising inequality. It gained traction when California lawmakers began debating ways of solving a huge and approaching Medicaid funding shortfall.

It is certainly possible that some billionaire fortunes will move out of the state, accountants will earn their keep, and the tax revenue will not usher in budgetary rainbows and unicorns. Public policy rarely achieves such dramatic results. But the choice before the California voter is not between perfection and ruin. It is between a state that asks something modest of its most fortunate citizens and one that asks nothing at all while public systems creak and falter.

In that contest, the sensible verdict is plain.

Tax the billionaires—not because they are villains, nor because success is a crime, but because a society that cannot summon the nerve to do so is one that has mistaken wealth for wisdom and power for virtue. And as any halfway attentive observer of the American scene will tell you, that sort of thinking is the beginning of rot.

Californians, thankfully, seem ready to give their state budget a fresh start.

A poll published last month by the UC Berkeley Institute of Government Studies found 52% of California voters were inclined to vote for the billionaire tax, 33% opposed it, and 15% were undecided.

Bravo, California.

Let the fairness begin.

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What’s happening in California is the same fight we’re in every day.

The predator class—the billionaires, the oligarchs, the people who treat paying their fair share as a personal insult—has been winning for forty years. They bought the press. They bought the politicians. They bought the courts. They want you tired, distracted, and quiet.

We’re none of those things. And we’re only here because you fund this.

Subscribing to BAM at $60/year—five bucks a month—is the most direct punch you can throw at the predator class from the comfort of your couch. Can’t swing it? Throw us a few bucks at our Ko-fi. Every dollar you send us is a dollar that doesn’t have to come from a sponsor we’d be ashamed of, an advertiser who’d want a quieter version of us, or a billionaire who’d want us silenced.

Tax the billionaires. Fund the press they can’t buy.

Same fight.

— Cliff