At 7:30 a.m. on January 1, 2026, the Washington Post’s editorial board rang in the new year with the headline “California will miss billionaires when they’re gone.” While Americans were still sleeping off their hangovers, the Post  — whose owner, billionaire Jeff Bezos, announced a little less than a year ago that the paper’s editorial page would “be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets — was already chiding unserious progressives and “​​bloodthirsty unions” for pursuing a state ballot initiative that would levy a one-time wealth tax on California’s billionaires, whom the paper called “the Golden State’s golden goose.”

It doesn’t seem to matter how many studies find that modest tax hikes on the rich do not spur economically devastating out-migration. The argument from economic conservatives is always the same: you better give those benevolent billionaires exactly what they want, which is lower and lower taxes; if you don’t, they’ll leave, and you’ll be sorry. Taxing the rich, or what the Washington Post called “confiscating successful people’s money,” can only lead to financial ruin.

The fight now shaping up around California’s 2026 Billionaire Tax Act is a rerun of last year’s in New York, where then-candidate Zohran Mamdani proposed a new tax on the wealthiest. In California, Silicon Valley–based congressman Ro Khanna is leading the charge, notably breaking with his tech base to champion the initiative. The measure would impose a one-time tax of up to 5 percent on the net worth of California residents with more than $1 billion, raising tens of billions of dollars to shore up the state’s health care system in the face of recent Republican-led cuts.