“Voters may feel better about the economy in two years, and turnout is likely to be higher in a presidential election year - so it may be a more hospitable environment,” Schnur said. They instead submitted the signatures one day later, on July 1, making the initiative eligible for the ballot in November 2024, although the secretary of state’s office would still have to validate the signatures before placing it on the ballot. Initiative backers said they had gathered the roughly 1 million signatures needed to qualify the California Pandemic Early Detection and Prevention Act for the November ballot, but intentionally missed a June 30 deadline to submit them to the California secretary of state. “Voters are usually pretty comfortable taxing rich people, but inflation has driven voter concerns about the economy and a recession to very high levels,” said Dan Schnur, a California political strategist. It would generate as much as $15 billion over 10 years, according to a state government analysis of the measure.Įven though the pandemic is not over and covid infections and hospitalizations are rising, the prospect of raising taxes - even on the wealthy - grew too politically toxic this year as inflation drove up the price of goods and Californians faced record-high gas prices. The initiative would have imposed an additional tax “ at the rate of 0.75 percent on that portion of a taxpayer’s taxable income” that exceeds $5 million.
For Henderson and the other tech entrepreneurs pushing the measure, moving forward appeared too risky without support from Newsom and a broad coalition that includes state lawmakers and powerful health and business groups. Gavin Newsom never publicly supported the initiative. “People are expressing rising skepticism over higher taxes, and the economy is dominating the hearts and minds of the electorate.”
“Our goal was to capture people’s acute attention on the pandemic to get something done - but there are economic problems and it looks like we’re headed for a recession, so things got more complicated,” said Max Henderson, the startup investor and former Google executive spearheading the campaign. But they acknowledge covid-19 is no longer top of mind for most Americans. The Silicon Valley tech executives who bankrolled the measure, which had been targeted for the November ballot, said they aren’t giving up on their goal of creating the strongest state public health system in the country. A ballot initiative that would have raised taxes on California millionaires and billionaires to fund public health programs and pandemic prevention is dead - at least for this year.
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