Laurel Rosenhall

And that would become a very expensive campaign season where voters are subjected to conflicting ballot measures on these tax issues.

Well, I think you summarized it exactly right.

And that's why when he does talk about this, he really focuses on his objection to a state-specific wealth tax.

And he does frequently say, we ought to have a conversation about a national wealth tax.

And

leaving the door open to the idea of a wealth tax if it was applied evenly across the country.

Right.

Without fully committing that he would do it at the national level, but say if we were going to do it, that's what we should explore.

And it is worth noting that he has opposed many wealth taxes in the past when they've come up in the California legislature.

The other thing he focuses on is that California has a very progressive income tax structure and the state does levy a lot of taxes on the wealthiest earners and saying that he agrees with the moral argument to tax the rich.

Exactly.

And so for Bernie Sanders, who is deeply invested in the idea of taxing billionaires and fighting the oligarchy, the particulars are of less concern to him.

The point is, levying a tax on the people who have so much to help people who have less, he doesn't see any problem with that.

Well, I think there's a couple lessons we can take away from this.

One is that the idea of sticking it to the rich is very popular.

The other lesson is that it's still really hard to pass and get across the finish line because of all of the particulars involved, because of the way that a tax is structured, and because of how influential the billionaire class is in our society.

The third lesson is that because it's so hard, people who want to do this kind of thing need a really broad base of support to push it across the finish line.

And I think that is what we're going to be seeing in California.

That will be tested over the next few months, how strong the support is for this idea, given how hard it is to go up against these opponents.

For the billionaires and also many tech leaders who are not billionaires, but who are aspirational, they see this as a kind of an existential threat that it really would set a precedent of going after the wealth that people have earned and taxing their possessions in a way that really has never been done before.