In November, Californians will vote on a one-off 5% levy on residents worth more than $1bn. The union-backed plan could raise $100bn, more than enough to replace federal healthcare funding stripped away by Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. About 200 very rich people would pay. But the referendum is becoming a test of whether extreme wealth can buy the political power to defeat a popular redistributive policy. Google co-founder Sergey Brin has already spent $100m backing opposition to the tax – a fraction of the $13bn bill he could face. Other billionaires are joining him. Whether voters can impose costs on the super-rich once their fortunes are big enough to shape the political process is now an open question. That alone should trouble any democracy.
It’s a long way from Mr Brin’s west coast lair of Mountain View to Andy Burnham’s Makerfield constituency. But the prime minister should heed the call from prominent progressive academics – led by the Nobel prize winner Joseph Stiglitz – urging Britain to join a new global push to tackle inequality. Prof Stiglitz wants help creating a new UN International Panel on Inequality (IPI). This stems from the G20’s first-ever inequality report, which warned that the yawning gap between rich and poor was a human-made crisis corroding democracy and social cohesion while blocking efforts to tackle the climate emergency.
