CA voters face 14 ballot measures, including a wealth tax

from Dan WaltersCalMatters

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When California voters in 1978 passed Proposition 13the iconic property tax cap, they simultaneously rejected Proposition 8which was included on the ballot by the Legislature as an alternative tax relief measure. While Proposition 13 outright limits property taxes, Proposition 8 simply authorizes the Legislature to lower property taxes on owner-occupied homes.

This may have been the first use of a campaign tactic that later became known as the “countermeasure”. Instead of simply opposing a measure, a rival interest group can place its own measure on the ballot, thereby muddying the waters. Voters will either choose between the two or be confused enough to reject both.

A classic example occurred in 2022, when California Indian tribes that own casinos proposed a measure that would give them a virtual monopoly on sports betting, and digital sports betting companies countered with a measure of their own. Hundreds of millions of dollars were raised for the rival measures and voters rejected boththereby maintaining the state’s ban on sports betting.

It also illustrates another aspect of vote-gathering politics: the tendency of competing interests to put their issues to a vote when the legislature cannot resolve them.

Over time, both trends made the ballot measure process — rather than legislation — California’s dominant method of resolving big issues.

Legislative leaders did not like being forced into a reactive role. Thus, in 2016, the Legislature changed the rules of the voting game to confirm its seat. It rules that even after qualifying for the ballot, initiative measure sponsors can remove them by a deadline.

Sponsors of competing qualified measures could negotiate compromises with the help of legislative leaders, sign them into law, and avoid very expensive pro-and-con campaigns.

The 14 measures that will appear on the November 3 ballot it would be up to 20 before last-minute compromises resolved three conflicts of dueling measures. One pits personal injury lawyers against ride-sharing companies, a second involves hospital executives and a health care union, and a third deals with minimum votes for local taxes.

Whether the compromises made political sense or not, the rival parties got enough out of them to justify dropping their ballot measures.

However, the most prominent ballot measure conflict — over whether California should impose a 5 percent wealth tax on billionaires — conflicting resolution. The measure, sponsored by the health care workers union SEIU, would be Proposition 40 and will compete with two countermeasures sponsored by billionaire Sergey Brin and other opponents of Prop. 40, Proposition 41 and Proposition 42.

They could, if passed with a higher number of votes, strike the wealth tax.

At one point, proponents of the wealth tax proposed reducing its bite to 2% as a compromise, but made no headway with the opponentsmost notably Governor Gavin Newsom.

Another tax measure sponsored by the California Teachers Association would make permanent a temporary surtax on high-income taxpayers first enacted in 2012 — but it could be caught up in a crossfire over Proposition 40. Democratic legislative leaders gave it some protection with a last-minute decree that it be placed on the ballot as Statement 3. So the voters will deal with it before facing the Props. 40, 41 and 42 much further down the ballot.

Given its high stakes and the national media attention it receives, the wealth tax is destined to be not only the single most controversial ballot measure this year, but likely to have the most expensive dueling campaigns, possibly setting a record.

In a webinar Tuesday covering the range of measures voters will face in November, campaign consultant Tino Rossi said the “pace car (for spending) is the billionaires’ tax.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.