Laura Nelson
speaker
47 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 12 Jul
Laura Nelson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So it is a first of its kind proposal in the U.S.
Typically in America, we tax assets when they're sold.
If you buy a stock and then sell it a couple of years later, you pay taxes on the gains that you make at the time of sale.
But when you hold it, you typically don't have to pay much, if anything.
This tax in California would impose a one-time 5% tax on
on the assets of individuals who have a net worth of at least a billion dollars.
So that means for someone worth $10 billion, the tax would amount to a one-time bill of about $500 million.
The healthcare union that's backing this tax has said that this revenue is vital because of cuts that have been made to Medicaid that were passed through Congress and signed into law last year by President Trump.
And the union that's backing this tax estimates that California could lose about $100 billion in funding for Medi-Cal, which is the state's Medicaid program, and that this revenue is the only thing that they could think of to backfill cuts of that size.
the idea with the health care union is that this would buy them a little bit of breathing room to figure out how to fund these programs over the long term.
And of course, during that time period, they are thinking there could be a change in which party controls Congress.
If Democrats take control of the House or the Senate or both chambers or the presidency in 2028, there could be real changes to the way that the country approaches health care spending and funding from a federal level as opposed to at a state level.
So this is kind of a stopgap.
The measure has qualified for the ballot.
That means that California voters in November will have the chance to say yes or no to it, up or down.
There's also two other measures that have qualified for the ballot as well that have been funded by a handful of people, including Google co-founder Sergey Brin.
And those measures take aim at portions of the wealth tax.
But we are headed into a very busy ballot measure season where there will be multiple billionaire tax-related efforts all on the ballot at the same time for voters in November.
Yeah, I would say the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, as they have gained prominence nationally, I would say we are seeing more and more discussion of this idea in states where that flank of the party is gaining strength.
And if you're not very wealthy, the idea of taxing wealthy people who aren't you has a lot of appeal.
Showing 1–20 of 47 · page 1 of 3
Next →