California’s Billionaire Tax Battle
15th March 2026
The New York Times, paper of record of the Crust.
Jon Feldhammer, like many Californians, often passes canvassers holding clipboards at the grocery store or on his commute to work. They’re part of an effort to collect the nearly 900,000 signatures required to put a proposed state billionaire tax on the ballot in November.
But Feldhammer isn’t tempted to add his name to the list: He’s on the other side of the fight.
A partner at the law firm Baker Botts, Feldhammer is one of the many high-powered lawyers, lobbyists and business leaders working against the initiative, which would place a one-time 5 percent levy on Californians with a net worth north of 1 billion dollars.
Needless to say, this article merely repeats the same old tropes: Wealth inequality is a Bad Thing per se and somehow (never specified) being wealthy is oppressing the non-wealthy; wealthy people, no matter how much they do pay, are never paying their ‘fair share’ (said fair share never specified); if the wealthy pay a lesser percentage of their income in tax, they are somehow ‘cheating’, whether or not that payment complies with the tax laws.
Some people are just congenitally butt-hurt if someone else has something that they don’t. There is a reason that Envy is one of the Seven Deadly Sins.
Case in point: It’s Good to Be a Billionaire, Even at Tax Time (also New York Times), which rings the changes on the Fair Share smear. His other assertion, that The Rich ‘play by a different set of rules’ and take advantage of ‘loopholes that aren’t available to the rest of us’, is just a bare-faced lie—the Tax Code is the Tax Code, and the same Tax Code applies to everybody—what he calls ‘loopholes’ were deliberately put in the Tax Code (by people smarter than him) so as to encourage the sort of investment that leads to productivity, economic growth, and (oh, by the way) more jobs.