What Newsom’s Wealth Tax Flip-Flop Means For Single-Payer

Will one policy flip-flop beget another? That’s the question facing the governor of the nation’s largest state as he ponders his political future.

Gavin Newsom, D-French Laundry, who has opposed an initiative on the November ballot imposing a wealth tax in California, recently announced his support for passing a wealth tax nationwide. All this political straddling raises another obvious question: If — more like when — Newsom runs for president in 2028, what exactly will he do regarding single-payer health care?

November Ballot Measure

The California wealth tax initiative made it to the ballot due to efforts by the SEIU-Health Care Workers West. The ballot measure would impose a one-time, 5 percent tax on the net worth of California residents worth more than $1 billion, to help backfill the loss of federal revenue from the purported health care “cuts” Congress enacted last year.

The measure brings with it obvious drawbacks. As currently constituted, the initiative will only lead to a one-time fillip of funds for California. But the prospect that its passage will prompt supporters to seek its renewal has already prompted several wealthy Californians to move to other states, to avoid the potential tax should the initiative pass. 

California’s state budget is already highly dependent on revenue from tech executives. And the prospect that an exodus of one-percenters could blow a huge hole in the state budget prompted Newsom not just to oppose the state wealth tax, but to enlist other leftist groups — including unions representing teachers and carpenters, and even Planned Parenthood — to line up against the health care union’s ballot measure.

But as soon as the deadline to keep the wealth tax off the November ballot passed, Newsom undertook a crafty pivot. While he said he would oppose a California-only wealth tax because it would lead to migration away from the Golden State, he suddenly endorsed a wealth tax on the federal level as a means to “save democracy.”

Appeasing “Big Tech” and “Big Woke”

A federal wealth tax brings with it numerous obstacles, starting with its questionable constitutionality. (“Direct taxes” must be imposed on states according to population.) It also raises questions about its implementation — would people receive refunds in years when the stock market tanks and their wealth suddenly declines? — and the same concerns about people moving overseas to circumvent the tax that Newsom has raised about wealthy Californians moving to other states.

Yet none of those questions stopped Newsom from suddenly endorsing a wealth tax that he has heretofore avoided like the plague. Politico noted that the endorsement of a federal wealth tax “was a classic move by the California governor: Seize the news cycle with a splashy announcement in an effort to reframe the conversation on his own terms.”

The editorial board of The Wall Street Journal claimed that the governor “is trying to walk a line between his Silicon Valley donors and his party’s ascendant left wing.…Mr. Newsom is trying to keep Silicon Valley donors in his corner by opposing the state wealth tax. But at the same time he’s abetting the union campaign by parroting their arguments.” (Of particular note: after a January 2024 Journal editorial associated Newsom with a state-level wealth tax, the governor griped publicly: “Are you supporting a wealth tax? No, yet again. Why the h— do you keep writing about that?”)

Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif,, another potential 2028 candidate, put Newsom’s evolving positions on a wealth tax more bluntly: “That’s like saying I was for it before I was against it, and it’s total flip flopping.”

Whither Single-Payer?

All these attempts to turn himself into a political version of Burger King (“have it your way”) make one wonder how Gavin Newsom will address single-payer health care during a possible presidential campaign. As I recently noted, Newsom won his first campaign for governor in 2018 on a pledge to enact single-payer in California — notwithstanding the fact that Donald Trump, during his first term as president, could veto any waivers California needed for federal funding to make a state-based system financially viable.

More recently, however, Newsom has effectively entered the Witness Protection Program regarding the issue. Under legislation that Newsom signed, his administration was supposed to develop a waiver application seeking federal approval for a unified health care financing system like single-payer. But the report his administration commissioned — released over a year after its due date—didn’t come close to meeting the requirements of that law, and his own Department of Health and Human Services doesn’t even mention that report on its own website.

The socialist left views single-payer health care as one of its shibboleths — something that politicians from Bernie Sanders to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Zohran Mamdani all endorse. So how will a Newsom presidential campaign address the issue? If he endorses it at the federal level, how will he explain how he failed to do the bare minimum to advance the left’s big cause during two terms running the nation’s largest state? If he suddenly opposes single-payer, how will he justify running away from an issue that is arguably the reason he got elected Governor of California and became a major presidential candidate in the first place?

Kamala Harris found out about the problems associated with trying to have it every which way on health care during her campaign for President in 2019. Her flip-flopping on the issue—first she supported single-payer, then she opposed Sanders’ bill, then she supported a single-payer plan, but one that wouldn’t take full effect until after she had left the presidency — brought to mind the old saw that the only creature in the center of the road is roadkill. Her California colleague Newsom should bear in mind this recent history. Given all his waffling over a wealth tax, it seems increasingly likely that he could face a similar fate in the 2028 presidential primaries when it comes to single-payer.