California’s billionaire tax is now headed for a November ballot fight — and yeah, the stakes could reach way past the ultra-rich.
This is The San Francisco Daily Fix. Today: the tax measure moving toward voters, an opening on BART’s police oversight board, and the local reform stories setting up the week ahead.
Monday did not ease us in.
No, it did not. Let’s start with the billionaire tax showdown.
Jennifer Wadsworth at Sfstandard has the details:
Backers of the initiative announced this weekend that more than 1.5 million people signed a petition to bring the one-time, 5% wealth tax to a statewide vote come November. That’s well beyond the 875,000 names needed to qualify the measure, and likely sufficient to account for illegible or invalid signatures.
So this is a real November fight now: hospitals and health coverage on one side, billionaire-tax skepticism on the other — and, very likely, Silicon Valley money all over the place.
Over on Reddit, r/sanfrancisco had a pretty pointed version of the concern:
The thing I dislike about this tax is that it’s one-time, which means whoever is using the funding is going to expect the program to continue and would want another tax somehow. It’s similar to how people are crying about our current SF city budget shortfall and cuts, when a lot of our city programs were expanded using one-time pandemic boost to fund programs that are not one-time programs.
That’s probably the strongest critique. One-time money has a funny way of turning into a permanent promise. San Francisco just went through that with pandemic-era spending, and the hangover is not theoretical.
Another r/sanfrancisco commenter was... less diplomatic:
We really doing this, huh? Instead of actually fixing our tax law, we're going to light money on fire.
“Light money on fire” is doing a lot there. But the point is real: ballot-box tax policy can become a workaround for the slower, messier job of actually fixing the tax code.
And one more r/sanfrancisco commenter made the flight-risk argument:
Dumbest tax move. It is one time tax so won’t help with anything else. And it will drive out highest $$ tax payers away from the state. Worst of the both worlds
We’d be careful with the automatic “everyone will leave” claim. But when you’re targeting highly mobile wealth, the risk is not imaginary. And even if the tax works exactly as advertised, one-time revenue is still a rough fit for programs that keep costing money every year.
Next up, from SFGate:
Volunteers are being sought for BART's 11-member Police Civilian Review Board. Prospects must live in Alameda, Contra Costa, San Francisco or San Mateo counties, be "fair minded and objective," and have a "demonstrated commitment to community service," BART said in an announcement.
Civilian oversight only matters if the applicant pool is wider than the usual transit insiders. If you ride BART and care about policing, this is one of those boring-sounding openings that can actually matter.
Links to everything we covered today are in the show notes, if you want to dig deeper on any of it.
That’s The San Francisco Daily Fix for Monday, April 27th. Thanks for listening. This is a Lantern Podcast.