California has a budget problem. Proposition 40 will make it worse.
The November ballot measure promises an irresistible political bargain: Tax roughly 200 billionaires, raise tens of billions of dollars and use the money for health care, education and food assistance.
But there’s a catch buried in the state’s own fiscal analysis. The nonpartisan Legislative Analyst warns that the measure would likely reduce California’s existing income-tax revenues by hundreds of millions of dollars or more every year.
That’s particularly dangerous for a state already extraordinarily dependent on a relatively small number of high-income taxpayers.
