California just certified a Billionaire Wealth Tax for the November ballot: a 5 percent one-time levy on the state's billionaires, payable over five years, projected to raise roughly $20 billion a year for health care, food aid, and schools. The impulse is understandable — the state has a revenue crater after federal cuts, and billionaires can afford to fill it. The problem is the base. The Center for Land Economics has published what it calls the first credible bottom-up estimate of California's total land value: approximately $8.14 trillion, cross-checked against federal housing-finance data and time-trended sales. That figure is roughly eight times the billionaire wealth the state can realistically tax. Los Angeles County's land alone exceeds the entire billionaire base the wealth tax targets. The Bay Area is close behind. The wealth tax's math is already crumbling. Six billionaires — Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Peter Thiel, Don Hankey, Travis Kalanick, and Steven Spielberg, worth a combined $540 billion — had already moved their tax residency out of state before the measure's January 1, 2026 cutoff. Mark Zuckerberg ($220 billion) followed in early 2026 and will likely challenge the retroactive reach in court. Add a roughly $200 billion overestimate other economists have flagged in the proposal's own model, and nearly half the assumed $2 trillion base has evaporated. To still hit $20 billion against what remains, the effective rate would need to climb from 1 percent toward 1.6 or 1.9 percent — depending on Zuckerberg's court outcome — which accelerates the exit spiral. This is the structural trap of taxing a small, mobile population: raise the rate to compensate for those who left, and you push out those who stayed. The op-ed's alternative: a land value tax of 0.25 percent on the $8.14 trillion base raises the same $20 billion, on a base eight times larger, that grows with the economy instead of fleeing it. Scale it to about 1 percent, and it covers California's entire $87 billion health and human services budget. Land cannot move. It cannot be hidden in a trust or redomiciled to Austin. And the burden concentrates on prime coastal lots and downtown blocks, not working-class homes in the Central Valley. The deeper diagnosis traces this dysfunction to Proposition 13, which in 1978 capped property taxes and froze assessed values until sale. The authors estimate California now assesses property at somewhere between 44 and 60 percent of actual market value — quietly choosing not to collect on roughly half its own real estate base. As property revenue fell, income taxes rose to compensate, giving California the highest state income tax rate in the country and a revenue base that walks out the door whenever it's squeezed. The wealth tax is the latest and most desperate squeeze. Florida offers the mirror image: it's trying to abolish its property tax entirely, which critics estimate would require roughly doubling the state sales tax — trading the one tax that doesn't distort the economy for one that hits every purchase working families make. Both states are ignoring the asset sitting under their feet.
