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The Quiet Way Trump Has Made Life Easier for Polluters
While attention has focused on Trump’s most splashy, explicit environmental policies—for instance, the administration’s proud evisceration of environmental protections such as auto fuel standards, oil drilling limits, and the “endangerment finding” underlying emissions regulations—a recent report shows the administration is also overhauling environmental policy in a quieter way: The Environmental Protection Agency is radically reducing enforcement of many environmental laws still on the books. Trump’s EPA, the report reveals, is overseeing a “historic” decline in enforcement of the nation’s environmental laws.According to the report, which was released by the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, or EDGI, last month, the EPA’s enforcement and compliance database, known as ECHO, shows major declines in enforcement, posing threats to the environment and public health. Compared with the final year under President Biden, the first year of Trump 2.0 produced a 40 percent plunge in lead paint hazard inspections, a 36 percent decline in toxic substances inspections, a 29 percent drop in average federal penalties for complaints filed, and a 29 percent increase in cases involving zero penalty for violators.These are not mere bureaucratic slippages, the report makes clear: Among some of the EPA’s “most important enforcement responsibilities”—such as inspections of hazardous waste, toxic substances, and air pollution—Trump’s EPA enforcement “is the worst of any administration in the last 20 years.”The agenda behind Trump’s epic rollback of environmental enforcement amounts to “Let’s inspect less, let’s enforce less, let’s fine less,” says report co-author Christopher Sellers, professor of history at SUNY Stonybrook in New York. “It’s all about making polluters’ savings great again.”The enforcement plunge is effectively erasing environmental protection, Sellers told me: “The whole idea of creating the EPA is that you need laws and ways of penalizing people if they don’t obey the laws. If you aren’t enforcing the laws, it’s like they’re not there.”When I asked the EPA about the EDGI report and Sellers’s assessment, press secretary Carolyn Holran responded with an email saying, “EPA will be publishing annual enforcement and compliance numbers in the near future. Suffice to say, they will upset narratives being peddled by left-wing climate cultists and show the Trump EPA is enforcing the law and carrying out its core statutory responsibilities of protecting human health and the environment like never before.”But the EPA’s own data shows a dramatically different trajectory. Inspections for drinking water fell by 15 percent in 2025, while inspections of air pollution and waste declined by 14 percent and water pollution by 5 percent, according to EDGI’s research of EPA data. Enforcement of the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act is “way down,” Sellers notes. Penalties for violations have plummeted, the number of violations involving zero fines have shot up, and inspections are down.Buttressing EDGI’s report is similar analysis from Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, or PEER, which found the EPA has nearly halted actions against major polluters. EPA enforcement “is dying on the vine, and that’s intentional,” PEER executive director and former EPA attorney Tim Whitehouse told The Guardian in February. An unnamed current EPA employee also confirmed to The Guardian that PEER’s findings were consistent with what they were observing internally.This sweeping deregulatory push exacerbates a longer-term “retreat of EPA from enforcement” in recent decades, according to EDGI—an “accelerating decline” that “augurs deepening dangers to Americans’ health and mounting damage to their communities and environments in the years ahead.”One major area of enforcement decline involves the EPA’s rapidly fading use of the courts and judicial action to compel compliance with environmental protections. This plunge in EPA court action means less enforcement against particularly egregious environmental violators who are less compliance-minded, Sellers explains.In 2025, Trump’s EPA “launched fewer civil judicial cases than any other administration in the past 20 years,” EDGI found—just one-third of what the Biden administration initiated in 2024. The Trump EPA has overseen a 66 percent shriveling in judicial cases filed and a 46 percent decline in cases concluded, EDGI found.In this “historic retreat from the courtroom,” the report argues, EPA is initiating and concluding dramatically fewer cases against “the worst environmental violators.” It’s a huge shift even from prior Republican administrations. When the G.W. Bush EPA announced a “similar commitment” to deregulation in the early 2000s, the report notes, “it was taking polluters to court 20 times more often” than Trump has. Trump’s industry-cozy EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin, has radically reduced the agency’s role as a protector of the environment and public health through deep staffing cuts and a complete reorientation of the EPA’s role and priorities. Zeldin initiated the staff cuts in July, promising to slash the agency workforce from 16,155 to 12,448, a gutting of more than 20 percent. In a statement reported by The Hill, Center for Biological Diversity attorney Ivan Ditmars noted, “Without the scientists and researchers to maintain strong health and environmental standards, polluters will profit while the rest of us suffer from dirtier air and water. As Trump stops policing pollution, we can expect more asthma attacks, lead contamination and all the other harms that EPA experts strive to prevent.”In a March 12 memo announcing “the greatest and most consequential day of deregulation in U.S. history,” Zeldin unveiled his onslaught on environmental protection and the Zeldin EPA’s priority of “unleashing American energy.” This policy overhaul included a “compliance first” approach that has significantly curtailed the enforcement actions, inspections, and penalties that longtime EPA regulators say are crucial to delivering on-the-ground compliance.Gary Jonesi, who worked at EPA from 1985 until Trump’s second election, says this approach gets it backward. “Compliance is the end goal, but enforcement is the tool to get us there,” he told me. Enforcement “needs to be unencumbered and unrestrained.” With greatly diminished staffing and “exceedingly little” enforcement by EPA, Jonesi notes, “now rule of law means they’re going to rein in enforcement at EPA, not go after polluters.”In response to my questions about its dwindling staff, the EPA press secretary claimed in an email the agency has “transformed its workforce” to be “best positioned to fulfill its statutory obligations, protect human health and the environment, Power the Great American Comeback, be an exceptional steward of taxpayer resources, and continue to make all decisions based on gold-standard science.” The agency says it is “doing more with less and we are confident we have the resources needed to accomplish these goals and our core mission.”But there is ample reason to worry that the EPA is enabling more pollution and violations. In the current deregulatory climate, Jonesi points out, EPA staff “self-censor” because they know “anything to do with fossil fuels that could harm or endanger someone” won’t be enforced. As Sellers points out, “This is an EPA that has exempted whole categories of polluters from having to comply if they write a letter.” Indeed, the EPA announced a special electronic mailbox “to allow the regulated community to request a Presidential Exemption under section 112(i)(4) of the Clean Air Act.” In at least one case, the EPA in June dropped an enforcement action against a major Trump donor, alleging more than 1,100 violations involving the misuse of disinfectants at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in California, ProPublica reported. The GEO Group, which donated a whopping $3.7 million to Trump and other Republicans in 2024, also had previously retained Pam Bondi, now attorney general, as a registered lobbyist.Jonesi, who retired four days after Trump’s inauguration and quickly launched a clean-energy advocacy group called CREEDemocracy, worries about major lapses in enforcing laws on lead paint hazards, as well as longer-term pollution threats from fossil fuels. “It’s particularly disheartening seeing seasoned agency people leaving and offices being shuttered,” he says.
How Gambling Ate the World
When I was in business school at the University of Pittsburgh in the early 2010s, I played in my one and only fantasy football league. I was in an “executive” MBA program, a variation on the traditional MBA degree that caters to mid-career and occasionally senior managers and executives, which is exactly what we were: a bunch of mostly middle-management guys (and a very few women), all of us looking for a résumé-burnishing credential that would bump us up a couple of pay bands and win us access to better boardrooms. We worked all over the place: in health care, the rail industry, steel, IT, law, nonprofit, oil and gas.One of the fellas worked in marketing for Pittsburgh’s Rivers Casino. (Slots were legalized in Pennsylvania at select locations in 2004, and, believe it or not, Pennsylvania lags behind only Nevada in total legal casino revenues.) He told some hilarious and hair-raising stories about the tricks of the trade for keeping the most compulsive customers, in this case largely fixed-income retirees or un- and underemployed adults, locked into the games, the never-ending sounds and lights of obsessive, repetitive, bets. You had to understand, he explained, that it wasn’t only or even mostly about winning. It was about the flow, the disappearance of anything other than the machine and the game. It was about action. Not the outcome so much as the anticipation, the suspended time between the bet and the result. They bring the drinks to you for a reason. Losing was a reason to keep playing, and the rare win was, well, reason to keep playing, too.As for the fantasy league, I’d always been a sports fan, but I was never a stats guy. I just let the computer draft for me, allowing some algorithm to assemble the rough equivalent of an index fund, something like a representative, weighted average of the NFL as a whole, and I let it ride. I am a zealously passive investor, and I became a passive fantasy sportsman.My league partners—not coincidentally, many of them were also intensely fond of day-trading stocks—took a different tack: tracking statistical minutiae, daily injury reports, message-board rumors, and making constant trades and roster changes. I spent the first half of the season winning and then, beset by injuries to my relatively static team, spent the second half losing. In neither half did I get much pleasure out of it. But my fellows, even (perhaps especially) when they were making manic trades to try to reverse a losing streak, seemed to be having a lot more fun. It was all about the flow.Betting and investing have much in common, and they increasingly overlap, as young men who bet on sports are also likely to dabble in crypto, stocks, and more exotic vehicles. Both are predominantly men’s games, with yawning gender divides in participation. Recent data from Morning Consult shows that sports betting is 70 percent male. Most men place their first bet on a sporting event in high school or college—their first foray into financial speculation, and their first taste of the adrenaline rush of action. According to a Siena survey, 48 percent of men aged 18 to 49 have a betting account.All this activity has become remarkably visible in the culture over just a few years. On TV, ads for betting apps have now achieved a ubiquity that puts gimmicky insurance companies to shame. NFL broadcasts partner with FanDuel and DraftKings, integrating highlights from games directly into the apps. And enticements to gamble reach beyond sports: CNN has announced it will partner with Kalshi, a “prediction market,” displaying a live ticker of odds on-screen during its news broadcasts. Bet if you dare, on the next market crash or atrocity. Pundits, posters, and commentators cite Polymarket along with poll numbers to predict future world events. Polymarket was also an “exclusive partner” of the Golden Globes, a desperate stunt for a moribund awards show. “Never tell me the odds,” barked Han Solo to C-3PO, but that was a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. We have no such option, and our garish Death Stars are all sponsored by BetMGM.For a long time in America, sports betting was mostly illicit. You had an uncle or a friend or a frat brother who took a little action under the table. Or you pooled some money with friends and did a March Madness bracket. Then, with the rise and popularization of the internet, it became easy to bet online. A thriving gray market of offshore betting parlors like BetOnline or Bovada eventually emerged, often starting with online poker as early as the 1990s and expanding into sports betting in the early 2000s, allowing U.S. customers to circumvent anti-gambling statutes in the United States. (Offshore bookmakers also became early adopters of cryptocurrency, unsurprisingly, as it allowed easier movement of money out of the United States without banks or credit card companies subject to U.S. regulations having to take note.) Even before betting apps on smartphones, the relative lack of friction of online betting paved the way for a new, faster, higher-frequency form of wagering.America’s gambling landscape had long been a patchwork, but sports betting was tightly regulated throughout most of the twentieth century, and the major sports leagues were scrupulously united in opposition to gambling, which they rightly viewed as a major threat to the integrity of their games. But the public was more ambivalent, and as states sought new sources of revenue, Congress decided to act.The most significant anti-sports gambling law was the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992, abbreviated as PASPA (and sometimes called the Bradley Act for one of its sponsors, Bill Bradley, a U.S. senator and former professional basketball player). The law—which garnered 62 co-sponsors in the Senate and passed both houses overwhelmingly—was in fact a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster. It did not technically outlaw sports gambling nationally, although that was broadly its purpose, but rather prevented state, local, and tribal governments from legalizing it. It contained robust carve-outs for Nevada (of course) and also for existing sports lotteries in Delaware, Montana, and Oregon. It exempted pari-mutuel horse and dog race betting and, for some reason, jai alai. It gave New Jersey—in a gift to Atlantic City—a year to come up with its own legalized sports betting regime. But, as writer and researcher Jonathan D. Cohen observes dryly in Losing Big: America’s Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling, “New Jersey, being New Jersey, failed to do so.”This failure was in some sense the great precipitating event of the broad legalization of sports gambling in the United States. After two failed attempts to overturn PASPA, Chris Christie, then the Republican governor of New Jersey, in 2014 signed a state law legalizing sports gambling in New Jersey in contravention of PASPA. The four major professional sports leagues and the NCAA brought suit; that suit eventually became Christie v. NCAA; by the time it was decided by the Supreme Court in 2018, Christie had been term-limited out of office, and it was renamed Murphy v. NCAA, after the state’s new Democratic governor, Phil Murphy. The Supreme Court overturned PASPA in May of that year, with Samuel Alito writing the majority opinion, concluding that PASPA illegally “commandeered” the authority of state legislatures and violated the states’ rights that we always hear about when some part of America wants to do something terrible. The floodgates opened. As of December 1, 2025, with the legalization of sports gambling in Missouri, a total of 39 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico had legalized some form of betting on sports.Losing Big and Everybody Loses: The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling, by sports journalist Danny Funt, each trace this story. Losing Big is perhaps a bit more cerebral and reads at times (particularly in its concluding chapter) as a policy white paper; Everybody Loses is occasionally scattered, its chapters jumping from topic to topic, but it is deepened and enlivened by the many extraordinary and candid contacts and conversations that Funt makes with industry insiders, from lobbyists to “VIP hosts” to corporate and league executives. Both cover in depressing detail the swift collapse of guardrails; the rush of revenue-hungry state governments to get in on the action; the swift acquiescence of professional and college sports, whose concerns about cheating and integrity were overwhelmed by the smell of money; and the ubiquity of Kevin Hart on your television and mind, selling vice.Both books focus on the two dominant players in the U.S. market—DraftKings and FanDuel. FanDuel started in Scotland, a pivot from an early “prediction market” company called Hubdub that allowed people to bet on the outcomes of the 2008 U.S. elections and found that, when the elections ended, the market evaporated. It turned to daily fantasy sports, or DFS, a rapidly expanding market in the United States, if a questionably legal one. As with BetOnline and other already existing internet-based sports betting sites (many of these based in the Caribbean), it was trivially easy for players to move real dollars into virtual, offshore online accounts for the purpose of placing bets.DraftKings was founded in Boston in 2012. The two companies were intensely competitive with each other, and their competition drove them to market dominance. They spent millions on lobbyists. (Kamala Harris emerges from Funt’s book as an accidental villain. He reports that when she was California attorney general, lobbyists heard a rumor that she was about to send DraftKings and FanDuel a cease-and-desist letter. At that time, her chief of staff was married to a partner in the law firm that represented the apps, who turned out to be a key figure in shaping efforts to get Harris to back off, according to one lobbyist who spoke to Funt.) FanDuel and DraftKings attracted millions of customers, and they learned a great deal about them, including personal financial information and their favorite sports and players. When PASPA fell and states began to legalize sports betting, they had an enormous first-mover advantage and a ready-made customer base to transform into dedicated, legal gamblers.Like traditional casinos, online sportsbooks use a variety of mechanisms to entice gamblers in and then to keep them betting. They use deceptive advertising, claiming generous “average” payouts when in reality “just 1.3 percent of [daily fantasy sports] players were collecting 91% of prize money,” according to a McKinsey report cited by Funt. Like traditional casinos, they employ “VIP hosts” to cosset heavy hitters, and they lure big bettors with comped Super Bowl trips and other complimentary goodies. For more ordinary suckers, their strategies have become more refined. For example, they track your betting frequency, and when it declines, they bombard you with special offers and incentives to get you going again. They are becoming shockingly sophisticated users of mined personal data. Because sportsbook apps require that users activate geolocation on their devices (ostensibly to be sure that gambling is legal where players are), they can pinpoint exactly where a gambler is sitting in a ballpark and use seat prices to infer income and wealth information. An exec at a geodata firm speculates to Funt that they could soon pinpoint the type, and price, of the residences in which bettors live. And of course the pure seamlessness of the apps, the incredible ease of moving money from a bank account into the app, is an enormous incentive to compulsive behavior: the drugs, the dealer, and the ATM all in a single, handheld device. Americans placed $150 billion in bets in 2024, a number that has continued to rise. DraftKings alone has nearly four million monthly users.Even as they strive to lure players in, sportsbooks are also perfectly willing to kick people out, to limit bets and arbitrarily reduce payouts. Sports betting is not pure chance, and while amateur gamblers are prone to making ill-informed bets for bad reasons (betting on personal favorite teams is a big one), smart gamblers and close followers of statistics and betting lines are quite capable of making money. “Increasingly,” Funt writes, “sportsbooks are seeking to boost profits by weeding out winning customers.... Sometimes customers don’t even get a chance to make money: They’re limited simply for demonstrating glimmers of competence.” A “Chicago-area attorney” and regular DraftKings customer named Beau Wagner, for instance, makes a sharp, $1,000 bet on a long-odds NBA scoring outcome and wins 50 grand. The next day, he finds himself limited to $100 bets on whole game outcomes and less than $4 a bet on single-game, single-player scoring. Funt goes on to quote DraftKings CEO Jason Robins, “This is an entertainment activity. People who are doing this for profit are not the players that we want,” and then an unnamed former DraftKings employee: “At the end of the day, these companies are built on losers.”Many losers appear in both Funt and Cohen’s narratives, such as Kyle, a pseudonymous young man who opens Losing Big on a losing streak that costs him his job and financial independence, and who closes it by relapsing into gambling after a failed recovery. Several of the features of online gambling make it easier than ever to lose large amounts. Bettors are able to instantly re-up their accounts with more and more money. This enables them to “chase their losses,” to imagine that the next winning bet will cover all the preceding losses. And if that doesn’t work? Bet again. Unlike traditional casinos, to which access is at least somewhat limited by physical location and hours of business, mobile betting platforms afford opportunities to gamble constantly. Bets can be placed continually throughout games and events. And bettors have access to any sport in any time zone. Too early or late for American football? There is a soccer match in England, boxing in Thailand, snooker in Australia. In this way, online sports gambling mimics social media’s endless, addictive scroll.The industry claims to support “responsible gaming,” and it allows “self-exclusion,” a porous and ineffective mechanism for voluntarily banning oneself from gaming, but these are a tissue. Since 2017, and especially since the pandemic, whose limits on social activity unsurprisingly turbocharged online gaming, calls to gambling addiction hotlines have exploded: From 2022 to 2025, calls to 1-800-GAMBLER quadrupled to 19,000 a month. There are now recovery centers for gambling addicts such as one run by Right Choice Recovery in Dayton, New Jersey. Athletes, including college athletes, routinely face abuse, harassment, and even death threats over their performance and appear resigned to it as background noise to their vocation. And everyone now openly speculates that someone—the players, the coaches, the refs—is on the take.Both books concede that sports gambling is here to stay, and they offer a variety of regulatory and technological fixes. They propose creating what Cohen calls more “friction”: imposing waiting periods between adding funds to an account and laying bets; limiting the number and frequency of bets; conducting finance checks on players, especially those who lay high-dollar wagers. Both call on the federal government to do more to create guardrails and enforce standards.These are the weakest sections of two otherwise excellent books and analyses. Like so much else about our present social, political, and economic discourse, such narrow recommendations feel like admissions of defeat. Sports gambling and all the abuses and problems it entails are part of a larger predicament, one that seems to be engulfing our entire society—a jackpot culture that prizes the lottery above work, wages, steady returns on investment. Equity markets are frothier than ever, with enormous AI companies puffing more and more into a self-inflating, self-dealing bubble. “Meme stocks” appear and disappear. Strange things are happening in commodities markets, with silver prices in particular rising even faster than gold over recent months. The entire extended Trump clan hawks various coins and crypto products.And now, nearly two decades after FanDuel’s election-prediction forerunner, so-called prediction markets are back with a vengeance. These are another form of casino, where players—often the same young men who play sportsbooks—can bet on the outcome or likelihood of, quite literally, anything. These casinos style themselves as “markets,” seeking the respectable patina of stocks, bonds, and commodities, but they are a form of wagering little different from sports betting. There is of course an element of chance in traditional capital market investments; stock prices can go down, companies do go out of business, creditors can go unpaid. But these things are not supposed to be a pure wager: There is supposed to be some asset at the other end, an ownership stake, a future cash flow, a barge full of soybeans. The invested or lent capital is, theoretically, being allocated into some productive enterprise: a business, a factory. How antique!“The long-term vision,” said Tarek Mansour, the co-founder of the prediction market company Kalshi, with the remarkable candor that now dominates a society that has abandoned niceties, decency, and restraint, “is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion.” To financialize everything. To do for the society and economy of the entire world what DFS and parlays and prop bets did for sports: crack them up into microscopic, constitutive parts and induce the population to wager on lines going up and lines going down, to take the greater whole and make it even less than the sum of its billions of parts.When in January the United States armed forces invaded Venezuela and kidnapped its president, Nicolás Maduro, along with his wife, Cilia Flores, one particular story, a minor subplot to the invasion, immediately caught my eye. A newly created account on the prediction market site Polymarket appeared on the Friday just before the invasion and bet $30,000 on what was at that time the extremely low probability that Maduro would be ousted. Like a long-shot racehorse winning the Derby, a low-probability event promises enormous rewards on these markets, many multiples of the original wager. Several other accounts then bet even more specifically on Maduro’s capture. That $30,000 bet turned into over $400,000 when the United States launched its weird, swift assault. These bets, a report from Axios observed with considerable understatement, “will renew longstanding questions about inside information and access to prediction markets.”“War,” wrote Smedley Butler, “is a racket.” And it is the “only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.” That was in 1935. We’ve advanced since then. We’ve collapsed the distance between profit and loss, between winning and losing, and we’re well on our way to eliminating the distinction between dollars and lives. How long will it be until we can bet on the single soldier, the success of a single bullet? There is something fundamentally anti-human about the transformation of every victory and every misfortune, every event, incident, outcome, opinion, intention, or accident into an occasion for a wager. How can we govern ourselves—and I mean this in both the political and the old-fashioned, personal sense—if we replace conscience and consciousness with nothing more than a guess? Whether a person or a society, those that take as a guiding attitude that they have nothing to lose will soon discover that it’s become literally true.
The Battle to Enact a Billionaire Tax In California
When the Los Angeles chapter of 50501, one of the loosely organized groups behind the No Kings marches against President Trump over the past year, heard about a proposed initiative to tax Californian billionaires, its volunteer members quickly signed up to help get the measure on the November ballot. The idea of a wealth tax wasn’t new to many activists, but the timing was right. Hunter Dunn, a 50501 member, said he’s noticed a change in the way his colleagues have talked about taxing the rich in the past few years. Instead of using the slogan that billionaires should pay “their fair share,” people use a more open-ended call: “Make billionaires pay.” That shift might seem subtle, but there’s an important distinction: Only the latter implies punishment.“[The billionaires] went too far supporting the American gestapo,” Dunn said. “They went too far actively bowing down to Trump and donating him money for … the ballroom, and then there were many, many, many of them directly referenced and associated with [Jeffrey] Epstein and [Ghislaine] Maxwell, child sex traffickers.… They’re not just sitting at a table with an alleged Nazi. They’re sitting at a table with an alleged predator, sex trafficker, and pedophile, as well. And the American people do not want that table to exist anymore.”At first, the tie between Epstein, who died in prison in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges, and a California ballot initiative isn’t obvious. But when viewed as part of the ever increasing anger at America’s elite and the role they play in supporting the Trump administration, it makes more sense. Taxing billionaires has been popular with voters since Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, who supports the California proposal, proposed it in their 2020 campaigns for president, but legislators haven’t answered the call. This year, California voters may be taking the matter into their own hands—and the proposal, no matter how imperfect, may ride the growing tide of left-wing populism to passage in the November elections.Diego Marquez, a 38-year-old optician who collects signatures for the proposal near his home in downtown L.A., says a lot of the voters he speaks with also mention Epstein. They want to “screw the billionaires,” he said. “A lot of people are fed up.”The proposed initiative is sponsored by the United Healthcare Workers West, a chapter of the Service Employee’s International Union, which began collecting signatures in January. The measure would implement a one-time tax of 5 percent for any legal California resident with assets over $1 billion in 2026. To land it on the state’s typically proposal-heavy ballot, the campaign must gather enough signatures to equal 5 percent of the total votes cast in the last gubernatorial election—so about 875,000 signatures. The deadline for collecting and verifying those signatures is June 8.The Teamsters have signed up to support the effort, as has 50501 and the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. The SEIU-UHW has more than 5,000 volunteers collecting signatures and has approved up to $25 million in spending for this and two other ballot measures.But the measure hasn’t gotten universal support, even from the left. The SEIU-UHW has sponsored many ballot initiatives in the past few years—45 since 2012—such that the union’s president, Dave Regan, has become somewhat notorious for it. According to recent reporting from The Information, a tech publication that covers Silicon Valley, not all of labor leadership in California is on board with the billionaire tax, worried it would make it harder to pass other wealth taxes or raise revenue for other programs. Some say Regan uses ballot initiatives “more as bargaining chips or political tools than as policy proposals,” according to The Information. In the past, ballot proposals have spurred the state legislature to act on measures or provide more health care funding ahead of potential ballot measures.Even many left-wing observers are questioning whether the proposal is a wise policy. A one-time tax on billionaires, of which there are about 200 in the state, isn’t exactly going to solve inequality. “Before this country starts messing around with major wealth taxes (which have a miserable track record in other countries), we ought to tax high incomes—not just billionaires—at a much higher rate, and increase capital gains and corporate tax rates, as well. All these income-based taxes stand today at what, historically, are appallingly low levels,” my colleague Timothy Noah wrote in January.Few countries attempt to tax wealth, Noah noted, and they often don’t raise much if they do. This is why many policy experts have objected to wealth tax proposals from Warren, Sanders, and others in Washington. Many politicians object, too—and not just Republicans. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has proposed closing the city’s budget deficit by increasing the income tax on millionaires, but can’t do so without action from the state government in Albany—and Governor Kathy Hochul opposes a hike. (State legislators are warmer to the idea. If it fails, Mamdani may end up having to raise local property taxes instead.)Similarly, the California proposal has gained a formidable opponent in Governor Gavin Newsom. “It’s a badly drafted effort,” he said in January, arguing that it could cost the state revenue over the longer term if the wealthy flee the state over the tax. Some have threatened to do just that, including Peter Thiel, the PayPal founder and Trump supporter, and Google founder Larry Page. In the past, few of the ultrawealthy have made good on such promises to leave when taxes are raised or politicians promise to raise them, but the threats, along with Newsom’s caution, could give Californians pause. “It’s going to be interesting to see if the moderate position from leaders like Newsom is going to maybe demotivate people,” said Carey Stapleton, a lecturer of computational political science at the University of Massachusetts. “[Voters are] getting inconsistent messages from their party leaders, the people they look up to.”Two initiatives have launched to fight the proposal, Stop the Squeeze and Golden State Promise, with the latter reporting a $10 million contribution from a San Francisco blockchain company. And Silicon Valley billionaires, including Google’s other founder, Sergey Brin, are spending on a group called Building a Better California, which is sponsoring three other initiatives, some of which would conflict with the billionaire tax proposal by preventing retroactive taxes or prohibiting its spending provisions.Opponents have said that a wealth tax, whether it’s one-time or long-term, would diminish some of the innovation centered in Silicon Valley by driving out the billionaires who invest in start-ups in the region now. But Representative Ro Khanna, who represents part of Silicon Valley, supports the billionaire tax and is co-sponsoring a similar federal tax with Sanders. And supporters of the tax say these concerns are misplaced. “I think if you walk down the dorm halls of Berkeley or Stanford and ask any aspiring entrepreneur, ‘Would you like to make a billion dollars from your start-up, but the price is a 1 percent tax to keep California hospitals open, I think every single entrepreneur takes that deal,” said Kris Cuaresma-Primm, who’s worked at Uber and other Silicon Valley start-ups and is now head of partnerships for the California billionaire Tax Act. “And if we go back in time, I bet the Google founders would have taken that deal too.”The SEIU-UHW has heard the critiques, and counters that the proposed tax was very deliberately designed to solve a specific problem caused by Republicans in Washington. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which President Trump signed into law on July 4, made cuts to health care, food stamps, and public education that are causing an acute fiscal emergency in states around the country. California could lose as much as $19 billion per year in Medicare and Medicaid spending and as much as $5 billion in food assistance spending. (Most states are in the same boat because they’re all likely to lose federal funding in the bill, which also makes rural and community hospitals especially vulnerable to cuts in services and closures.)Suzanne Jimenez, chief of staff of the SEIU-UHW, said the goal is “to try to save our health care system and make sure that it’s functional, just until we find a longer-term solution. It became clear that focusing on billionaires, the most fortunate among us in California, paying a very minimal 5 percent one-time tax to just bolster the health care system … it just made the most sense.”David Gamage, a professor of law who specializes in tax law at the University of Missouri and helped write the proposal, said that the simplicity of the tax was part of its appeal. The SEIU-UHW wanted to raise money very quickly, and the fact that the tax would affect such a small number of taxpayers means the state could easily conduct hand audits to collect it. But it also means that the projected revenue—about $100 billion over five years, since the billionaires would not have to pay the tax all at once—could be impacted if even a few billionaires made good on their promise to leave.The proposal relies on California’s legal definition of residency, which means that if they are “domiciled” in California but leave for a transitory or temporary purpose, they may still count as a resident. Simply buying a second property elsewhere wouldn’t count. “Certainly, a lot of billionaires bought some property in Florida and were reported as maybe leave,” Gamage said. “Whether any of them actually left as a matter of California law, I haven’t seen any critical reports that make me think so. I wouldn’t be surprised if … one or two did.… I would be very surprised if it’s a substantial number did.” It’s unclear if any billionaires changed their residency before January 1 in a way that abides by California law, and they’d likely have to prove the change in court.But these technical questions may be irrelevant to the California voters who are angry about the direction of the country under Trump and want to express their rage at the ballot box in November.Anger and populism go hand in hand, and they’ve been rising on the left for some time—at least since the Great Recession, which took a magnifying glass to the widening economic inequality in America. Ryan Dawkins, an assistant professor of political science at Carleton College in Minnesota, notes that while populist anger on the right today targets markers of social change, like immigration and diversity in public life, the left’s target is the tightening web of political and financial elites. “There’s just this frustration around affordability ... like we can’t live our lives, like we can’t even pay our bills, and we’re seeing that the top 1 percent ... all the wealth is accumulating to them, and that’s what’s driving this growing inequality,” Dawkins said.The growing inequality and the affordability crisis are stirring an anger that is easily directed at billionaires, and voters might be less concerned about the specifics of the tax than whom it’s targeting, Stapleton said. “Most people are not paying attention to politics daily. They’re not thinking about policy every day,” he said. “But then when they see a politician publicly be angry about something, that gives them kind of more time to think about their own anger, which ultimately makes them angrier about things, and then turn out to vote.”
How We’re All Now Paying the Price for the Myth of Trump’s Competence
At some point, early Wednesday morning, the cost of the Iran war will top $10 billion. The Center for Strategic and International Studies released a paper last week pegging the cost of this latest misadventure at $891 million a day. I’ve seen higher estimates, but CSIS is a respected nonpartisan outfit, so let’s go with its number for now. The report states that the vast majority of this money had not been previously budgeted, especially the spending on munitions. One Patriot interceptor missile costs close to $4 million, and we’re apparently burning through them. And “War” Secretary Pete Hegseth promises that we’re just getting revved up.None of us knows how long this war is going to last. But it’s certainly no Venezuela, which took—ready?—two and a half hours. Donald Trump may have told British Prime Minister Keir Starmer over the weekend that the war was “already won.” But also over the weekend, a prewar intelligence report was leaked to two Washington Post reporters showing that the National Intelligence Council, a panel of independent intel experts, seems to think that dislodging the regime could take a very long time indeed—at $37 million an hour, a rate that is almost sure to rise, especially if ground troops get involved.Meanwhile, gas prices went up about 60 cents a gallon in the war’s first week. The Dow fell 453 points Friday. (It’s currently well below 50,000, so I guess that means, per Pam Bondi, that we’re now allowed to take the Jeffrey Epstein scandal seriously.) Also on Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that the U.S. economy lost 92,000 jobs in February. In the year and change since Trump returned to office, the economy has added around 140,000 jobs. In a year. The St. Louis Fed estimated last spring that simply to keep pace with the growth in the number of people who age into the labor force, the economy needs to add around 150,000 jobs a month. In other words, everywhere you look, the news isn’t merely bad. It’s terrible.We’ve seen numerous examples in these last 13 months of Trump’s mendacity and malevolence. Unfortunately, a lot of Americans will never see him that way. There are those who adore him unconditionally, but beyond these dead-enders, there are others who know he’s not a good person but aren’t all that bothered by it. That’s hard for millions of us to accept. But I hope to God that these people are finally starting to move themselves toward the conclusion that, even if they aren’t that troubled by the mendacity and malevolence, the man is just wildly incompetent. A mountain range of mythmaking has gone into creating the Trump persona over the years; by him, by a pliant business press in his real estate days, and, since he entered politics, by a right-wing media that would make the old Soviet press agencies blush and a party of cowardly sycophants, most of whom know very well that he shouldn’t be in charge of a high-volume McDonald’s, let alone the executive branch of the federal government, but would rather let the country collapse than say so.I remember a conversation I had with a Biden White House official in the spring of 2024, when Joe Biden was still running. I was asking about Trump’s weaknesses, and this official said something to me that may stand as the single most depressing couple of sentences I’ve ever had directed at me in 30-plus years of covering politics. We’re not going to dislodge people’s belief that he’s a great businessman, this official said; forget it. It’s hardwired in there, and undoing it, for a significant percentage of the people, just isn’t going to happen.I believed this person, whom I’m known for a while; yet another part of me just couldn’t quite accept that people could be so—well, choose the word you prefer. And I was staggered during the 2024 campaign at all the voters who believed him when he said he’d bring down prices on day one.Really. Who is that—OK, I’ll supply my own word—stupid? Presidents can’t control prices. Prices—of eggs, beef, oil, refrigerators, computers, you name it—depend on dozens of factors. Xi Jinping, who runs a command economy in a country where most electronics happen to be made, probably has far more control over the prices of refrigerators and computers than any president ever will. The price of beef has more to do with decisions made in Brazil than in Texas—and certainly at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.We all learn this in school. So how did so many millions of Americans unlearn it? Another thing presidents don’t normally control is who runs other countries. At times, of course, American presidents have indeed made that choice for other countries. By the way, I can’t think of a single time that worked out well for the country in question. Cuba (in 1933, not 1959), Guatemala, Nicaragua, Chile, and perhaps most of all, back in 1953, the same Iran we’re now “re-obliterating.” I hate to say it: It never ends well. In more recent history, American presidents haven’t had, or exercised, that power. Yet Trump is going around now talking as if he has the power to appoint Iran’s next leader, as if it’s no more complicated than naming the next GOP chairman of Mississippi. As if there won’t be factions within the Iranian populace that will fight the elevation of anyone with the taint of a Trump association to the death. Again, who can possibly believe his nonsense?His poll numbers are bad. But they’re not nearly as bad as they ought to be. The man is, whatever his other faults, just way in over his head. Maybe Democrats should say that more often. The fact that he’s costing taxpayers a billion dollars a day on a war most of them didn’t want may be a good place to start.
Why Democrats will wait on Gonzales
Keep an eye on whether Republicans move to boot indicted Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, D-Fla.
Trump threatens to block his own agenda over voting bill
The president is refusing to sign other bills until Congress passes the GOP’s federalizing ID and citizenship requirement for voting in elections.
Trump set to speak at Republican retreat
Some Republican lawmakers are privately concerned that the escalating conflict in Iran could overshadow the president’s domestic agenda.
Delay in Trump’s Texas endorsement raises GOP anxiety
Every passing week means more costly spending in the GOP runoff battle between Sen. John Cornyn and state Attorney General Ken Paxton.
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