David Gamage was out to dinner with his wife and was already a few drinks deep late last year when his phone buzzed. According to the name on the screen, the call was coming from California congressman Ro Khanna.
Gamage, a tax law professor at The University of Missouri, was initially skeptical; he’d never spoken with Khanna before. But the outreach also made some sense. The Democratic lawmaker had recently voiced support for a California ballot initiative that Gamage and several other tax scholars coauthored—an initiative that would levy a one-time, 5% tax on California billionaires to help cover public education and cuts to federal healthcare funding in the state.
The proposal, which is sponsored by the California health workers union SEIU, had provoked furious backlash, prompting billionaires like Peter Thiel to begin cutting ties in California. Khanna, whose district is in Silicon Valley, had responded to their threats with a decidedly heavy dose of snark on
Now, Khanna wanted to dig into the details with Gamage about how the proposal would work in practice.
“It was a somewhat surreal experience from my side,” says Gamage, who spent the evening attempting to elucidate the intricacies of complex tax policy over text. The two men followed up with a phone call where Khanna probed even further, expressing his concerns about how the proposal might impact “paper billionaires,” whose wealth is tied up in illiquid stock. The depth of the discussion surprised Gamage. “He has expressed real interest in understanding the mechanics and economics in a way that most politicians don’t,” Gamage says.
But that has hardly won Khanna any brownie points with California billionaires, many of whom were once some of his most devoted supporters. Former Google chair Eric Schmidt is among the billionaires backing a new super PAC to oppose the proposal, including by pushing a rival ballot measure to block the wealth tax. Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan and venture capitalist Ron Conway, both Khanna donors in the past, have thrown their weight behind Ethan Agarwal, a tech founder who recently abandoned his longshot race for governor to go after Khanna’s House seat in the California primary.
“Khanna has turned his back on the people of CA17,” Tan wrote on
