In California, a recent proposed ballot measure would tax billionaires 5% of their net worth. The proposal, which needs nearly 1 million signatures to make it onto the ballot come November, has sparked conversations about inequality, wealth flight, and the future of Silicon Valley: will tech founders stay in a state ruled by the fickle whims of the masses?

There’s been less attention, however, on the architects of the proposal themselves: who they are and what they want. And they do indeed want something besides the acute “emergency” of acquiring more funding for healthcare, which is the stated justification of the tax.

For decades, California’s ballot initiative system — which allows regular people to pass new laws and constitutional amendments by popular vote — has been sold as a check on entrenched power. Increasingly, it has become something less noble: a marketplace where unions, advocacy groups, and corporations can, for the small cost of several million dollars, essentially buy nearly-impossible-to-undo policies that support their interests.

The so-called “billionaire tax” is no different. Both the union that sponsored the proposal — Service Employees International Union-United Health Care Workers West (SEIU-UHW) — and the academics who wrote and influenced it are turning to the ballot prop system to scale progressive causes. Dave Regan, the president of SEIU-UHW, for example, has described it as a cost-effective way to grow the union’s membership and influence. Meanwhile, the academics — world-leading tax scholars and economists — have been advising ill-fated wealth taxes since at least 2019. Compared to the gridlocked legislative bodies that have shut down their proposals in the past, they seem to believe that “direct democracy” offers a chance to finally check the “oligarchical” billionaire class.

What follows is an introduction to the key players, with an analysis of their goals, based on their books, speeches, public statements, and interviews.

First up: meet the union and its president, Dave Regan.

SEIU-UHW, the proposal’s sponsor, is one of the most powerful unions in the US. It represents 120,000 healthcare workers in California, most of whom work for Kaiser Permanente (where, in 2023, Regan led the largest healthcare worker strike in US history).

SEIU-UHW claims a budget shortfall caused by Republican cuts to Medicaid could literally shutter hospitals in the state (and, by extension, leave some of its members without jobs).

“We have to do something because if we don’t, people are not going to have a hospital to go to,” Suzanne Jimenez, SEIU-UHW’s chief of staff, told Bloomberg.

But it’s important to understand that, under the leadership of Regan since 2011, SEIU-UHW has become a professional ballot proposition factory or, as Bloomberg put it recently, “one of the nation’s most aggressive users of direct democracy.” And in California, the approach has won Regan something of a cutthroat reputation.

Subscribe now