Californians will face two competing tax measures this November. The first is the Billionaire Tax Act, a one-time, five percent levy on the accumulated net worth of the state's richest residents. Lesser known is the Retirement and Personal Savings Protection Act, which would draw constitutional lines around what Sacramento can and cannot tax, prohibiting new levies on retirement accounts, personal savings and individually owned assets and banning retroactive taxation.

Everyone with even just a little bit of money set aside — not just the California billionaires targeted by the wealth tax — should understand what these two measures represent.

Start with the Billionaire Tax Act. The gap between what it promises and what it would deliver is stark. Joshua Rauh of Stanford University has run the numbers with his Hoover Institution colleagues, and the results cast doubt on the prospect of any revenue gain whatsoever.

Proponents claim the tax would raise $100 billion. Rauh's team found that billionaires have already been voting with their feet: Larry Ellison left California in 2020, and six others, including Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, departed between the proposal's announcement and Dec. 31, 2025 — the day before the liability would take effect.

These departures alone reduce the measure's supposed tax revenue by nearly 40 percent before a single dollar is collected. Once migration patterns........

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