It's the Brian Laris Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Let's talk about this California

wealth tax proposal. California is home to more billionaires than almost anywhere on earth. Now it's also the

site of a new political fight over what exactly the ultra-wealthy owe the state that arguably

helped make them rich. There's this proposal backed by labor groups primarily that it would

impose a one-time five percent tax on Californians worth

more than a billion dollars with the goal of funding health care and other public needs.

It is a wealth tax. It's a one-shot, not an ongoing income tax. Now, for proponents of the tax,

it's a rare chance to tap extreme wealth and shore up finances for needed services without really dinging the finances of the people who get taxed.

Opponents, including some of the state's richest residents, not surprisingly, say it's punitive, unconstitutional, and could backfire by pushing billionaires

to flee California altogether with their tax dollars. And by the way, Governor Davin Newsom is also

against it. Suzanne Jimenez is chief of staff at SEIU United Healthcare Workers West,

an architect of the proposal. She joins us now

to explain how it would work and make the argument that it would work and be a good thing

for the state and the world. Ms. Jimenez, welcome to WNYC. Hello from New York. Hi, Brian. Thank you for

having me today. Do you want to introduce

yourself a little bit first and say a bit about how SEIU United Healthcare Workers West became

interested in this? Yeah, absolutely. So we are a health care workers union. We represent

120,000 health care workers across the state.

And last year when HR1, the one big beautiful bill, was signed into law by President Trump,

it became very clear that we were going to see significant cuts to our health care system.

You know, that's not true just for California.

It's true across the country. But as we really dug into what that was going to mean for our state, you know, in the next five

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