The Fight for a State That Works

In startup investing, you learn to judge a company by its growth curve, not a single snapshot. By that measure, California’s pragmatic center has had a good year: winning local races, building coalitions, and proving that competence beats ideology. The trajectory is encouraging.

But one measure on November’s ballot could complicate it: the so-called billionaire tax, a one-time levy on the state’s wealthiest residents. Like San Francisco’s Proposition D—which was handily defeated in June—the measure deserves a careful look, because the Californians with the most at stake aren’t billionaires. They’re the little tech founder, the small-business owner, the parent, the nurse, the retiree—people who built something here and want this to remain a place worth building in.

A Closer Look At The Proposal

The measure would impose a one-time 5 percent tax on the net worth of Californians worth more than a billion dollars (in assets, not income) applied retroactively to anyone who lived here on the first of this year. What makes it unusual is that it taxes wealth rather than earnings: not the income you’ve made or the gains you’ve realized, but the value of what you hold on paper. Functionally, it establishes an entirely new category of taxation with no clear stopping point. Today the threshold sits at a billion dollars, which feels comfortably far from most people. But taxing what people own rather than what they earn is a meaningful line to cross, and a threshold is a policy choice that can move over time. A tool built for the very top doesn’t always stay there.

The kind of wealth the tax would target is mobile in a way wages are not, and it’s already moving: in the months since the measure was announced, several of California’s wealthiest residents quietly changed their legal address to lower-tax states, and realtors across the Nevada line have noticed.

Every departure takes more than a one-time payment with it. California’s budget already leans precariously on a tiny number of top earners, who provide an outsized share of its income tax. When they leave, we don’t lose a single levy: we lose the years of income tax that actually keep hospitals and classrooms running. The state’s own nonpartisan Legislative Analyst found as much; while the measure might raise money in the short term, it is likely to reduce ongoing income-tax collections by hundreds of millions of dollars a year as people exit. A tax that shrinks the base it depends on can end up working against the very services it’s meant to fund.

We’ve seen this instinct before, in San Francisco’s “CEO tax,” which was defeated in June—a symbolic gesture that makes a political point while leaving the underlying problem untouched. Now the experiment is statewide, and California’s reputation as the place ambitious people come to build is on the line.

Who Has Concerns, and Why

On the surface, this may look like a wealthy investor opposing a tax on the wealthy. But look more closely at who is actually voicing reservations, and that framing falls apart.

Many of the people expressing concern are the ones the measure is meant to help: a diverse coalition of teachers, doctors, nurses, engineers, and public safety leaders have expressed reservations about this tax. The California Medical Association, which represents the state’s physicians, has concluded that a one-time windfall that drives top earners out of California could ultimately mean less money for healthcare, not more—which is why it favors a permanent extension of the Prop 55 income tax on high earners as a steadier source of funding. The California Teachers Association reached the same conclusion: 800 educator delegates debated and voted no, warning that a one-time revenue spike will not reliably fund schools. Law enforcement and public safety groups joined the coalition for identical reasons, noting that budget volatility is a direct threat to the staffing and resources that keep neighborhoods safe. California YIMBY, a pro-housing organization, added its opposition, warning that driving away capital investment will slow housing production at exactly the moment the state needs to build more.

What unites these groups is telling. These aren’t people trying to protect billionaires. They’re people who want to fund healthcare, schools, safety, and housing—and who, having looked closely at this particular mechanism, worry it would set those goals back. They aren’t arguing against doing more for Californians; several, like the CMA, are pointing toward more durable ways to do it. California’s hardest problems are ones we have to govern our way through, not tax our way out of.

The people who’d feel this most aren’t the billion-dollar incumbents. They’re comfortable. They can hire their way around a broken permitting system, absorb a dysfunctional city, and lobby for whatever exemption they need. When people picture “Big Tech,” they picture them—and react accordingly. But those aren’t the people this lands on hardest.

The people who can’t hire their way out are the builders of little tech: the two-person startup that can’t survive a two-year permit, the small-business owner one bad ordinance away from closing, the engineer who wants to build her company here and is quietly being told to go to Texas. These aren’t the faceless giants people resent. They’re hardworking people making payroll, signing leases, and betting their savings on something that doesn’t exist yet—and on paper, a valuation can make them look rich long before any of it is real.

Little tech wants the same thing as the nurse, the teacher, and the immigrant shop owner: a state that simply works. That shared interest, across people who are usually told they have nothing in common, is the coalition. It’s the little guy, in every sense, deciding he’s done being overlooked.

Bigger Than One Ballot Measure

This moment is bigger than any single donor, PAC, or organization. It asks something of a much wider group: the tech founder and the immigrant small-business owner, the nurse, police officer, and the engineer, the early check-writer who provides the seed money, the business leader willing to engage on public policy, and the thought partner willing to sit with a legislator. This is the moment where passive agreement becomes active partnership.

That coalition already exists. The June primary was the first real test of a young movement that prizes competence over ideology, and the results were encouraging. Garry’s List Action, my political action committee, my own donations, and a growing set of allied groups backed winning campaigns up and down the ballot: Sen. Scott Wiener’s run for Congress, San Francisco Supervisors Matt Dorsey and Stephen Sherrill, Judge Phoebe Maffei, Phil Kim for the San Francisco school board, Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen, and San Jose City Councilmember Nora Campos. Scott Sakakihara advanced as a finalist for California’s 10th Senate District in Union City.

Look at that list and you don’t necessarily see a national wave. You see a supervisor, a district attorney, a judge, a school-board seat. But these are the offices that decide whether your street is safe, whether your kid can read, or whether a permit clears. These are the seats that shape daily life far more than most fights in Washington, and they are exactly where this movement was built to compete. What unites the people who won them is not an ideology but a profile: pro-housing, pro-education, pro-public-safety, pro-innovation, and willing to challenge orthodoxies on both the left and the right.

This coalition didn’t come from a consulting firm or a party headquarters. It emerged during the pandemic, when ordinary Californians began asking why government couldn’t do its most basic jobs. Schools stayed closed while kids fell behind, street disorder became normal, and violence against Asian American families drew little attention. Immigrant families who had done everything right were told their safety and their children’s classrooms were somehow negotiable. Out of that frustration came parents, teachers, doctors, engineers, small-business owners, and retirees united not by ideology but by pragmatism.

Pragmatism can sound like a posture rather than a program, but materially, it means a housing permit that clears in weeks instead of years, so supply actually rises and rent stops outrunning paychecks. It means addiction and homelessness policy measured by how many people get into treatment and off the street, not by how compassionate the press release sounds. It means schools judged by whether children can read and do math at grade level, and police and prosecutors evaluated by whether neighborhoods are actually safer. It means funding what demonstrably works, auditing what doesn’t, and holding the agency or contractor that fails to account—treating government less as a moral performance than as a service that owes its users results.

November is not the whole game. That organizing infrastructure must be funded and expanded, not just for this ballot measure, but for every school board, supervisor race, and DA seat that comes after. This moment is as much an invitation as anything else. The question is whether the attention it generates gets converted into the long-term investment this movement needs to build and hold the bench.

Garry’s List started as a simple way to give ordinary people the information the political machine would rather they didn’t have. The same machinery that turns a reader into an informed voter can turn that voter into a donor, a volunteer, a precinct captain, or eventually a candidate. That is how a movement compounds, and the work we do will stretch far beyond November.

The pragmatic center’s challenges weren’t created in one election cycle, and they won’t be solved in one. The wins this year were real, and they were won by everyday people who decided to organize. Whatever the results of the upcoming election, this movement will continue. The conditions that created the pragmatic center, and the public’s appetite for a government that simply works, won’t have changed. November is an opportunity as much as it is a challenge.