Billionaires spent nearly $400 million to sink California’s wealth tax — and the tax-the-rich side won all 3 income tax measures on the ballot

ملخص مفصل

Emmanuel Saez, a UC-Berkeley economist who studies inequality and helped design Proposition 40, lamented the loss, saying: “Today oligarchy has won.”

State efforts to tax the rich did relatively well in the 2026 midterm elections, following a series of state legislative moves in that direction in recent years.

That might come as a surprise because a majority of voters rejected California’s Proposition 40. The much-publicized ballot initiative would have imposed a one-time 5% tax on the net worth of the state’s roughly 200 billionaires. Google co-founder Sergey Brin and several other billionaires spent nearly $400 million trying to persuade voters to reject it.

Emmanuel Saez, a University of California, Berkeley economist who studies inequality and helped design Proposition 40, lamented the loss, saying: “Today oligarchy has won.”

As a law professor who recently wrote a book about wealth inequality, I have been monitoring the results of these efforts aimed at taxing the rich. Despite Proposition 40’s failure, I think it’s important to observe that many Americans expressed support during the midterms for hiking income taxes on the rich, and to a lesser extent, taxes on the second – or third or fourth – homes the very wealthy possess.

Taxing income is proving a more successful strategy than taxing wealth.

Major changes to income taxes were up for a vote in five states during the midterms. Three of those ballot initiatives were proposals that sought to boost income tax rates on the rich or maintain those rates. All three prevailed.

In Washington state, for example, voters backed a measure that will preserve its new 9.9% income tax on household income above $1 million. This “millionaire’s tax,” signed into law earlier in 2026, is the state’s first personal income tax.

Meanwhile, Colorado voters rejected Proposition 136, which would have capped the state’s income tax rate at 4.4%. They also approved Amendment 87, a new graduated income tax that raises rates on households and businesses with incomes over $500,000.

And even though California’s voters rejected Proposition 40, they did approve Proposition 3.

مطلع المقال، مقتطف من Fortune. لقراءة المقال كاملًا، افتحه على موقع الناشر.