California's billionaire wealth tax will fail because billionaires can move — the land can't

California has certified a Billionaire Wealth Tax for the November ballot: a one-time 5 percent levy on billionaires, spread over five years, meant to raise roughly $20 billion annually for health care, food aid, and schools amid federal cuts. In a new report from the Center for Land Economics, Greg Miller and Lars Doucet argue the measure is structurally doomed because its tax base has legs. Six billionaires worth about $540 billion combined — including Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Peter Thiel, and Travis Kalanick — had already shifted their tax residency out of state before the January 1, 2026 cutoff, and Mark Zuckerberg followed shortly after and is expected to challenge the tax’s retroactive reach in court. Between wealth flight and an overestimate baked into the proposal’s own model, the authors say nearly half the assumed $2 trillion base is already gone, and raising rates to compensate only accelerates the exodus.

Their alternative is a land value tax — an ordinary property tax levied only on land, not the buildings on it. The authors built a parcel-by-parcel estimate putting California’s land at about $8.14 trillion, cross-checked three ways, roughly eight times the taxable billionaire wealth; Los Angeles County’s land alone exceeds the entire billionaire base. A rate of just 0.25 percent would match the wealth tax’s $20 billion, on a base that grows with the economy, can’t flee, can’t be passed to renters, and captures the value the public itself creates through infrastructure. Because land value is heavily concentrated in prime coastal and downtown parcels, the burden falls on the wealthy without chasing them.

The deeper problem, they contend, is 50 years old: Proposition 13 froze assessed values until sale, leaving California collecting on an estimated 44–60 percent of its real-estate base and leaning on the nation’s highest income taxes to fill the gap. The wealth tax, in this framing, is the most desperate patch yet over a broken foundation. The authors note the same blind spot elsewhere — Florida moving to abolish property taxes entirely — and argue both states are ignoring the one large, immovable, economically undistorting tax base sitting under their feet.