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.
The academics argue that Mr Burnham’s Makerfield test – which aims to be fairer to places neglected by Westminster – should apply abroad as well as at home. By connecting the government’s domestic programme to its foreign policy, a distinct Burnhamism could take shape. Between 2000 and 2024, the richest 1% captured 41% of new global wealth; the poorest half received 1%.
Britain mirrors this divide. The economist Gabriel Zucman says the UK’s richest 0.001% – about 200 families – held wealth worth 5% of GDP in 1989. Today, those families command an astonishing 25% of the country’s GDP.
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