You’ve heard of the oil lobby, the tobacco lobby, the Israel lobby, the charter school lobby. Behind all of these are billionaires who benefit from the underlying industries or sectors, and whose corporations use their resources to lobby the government for favorable policies. Now, in reaction to a California ballot initiative for the world’s first billionaire tax, we have an innovation: a lobby for billionaires themselves.
Self-advocacy by wealthy people is nothing new, of course. But faced with the prospect of persuading voters to reject Proposition 40 — a temporary tax on roughly two hundred unfathomably rich individuals to fund health care for millions of people — billionaires must make the case to the public that forcing them to share a small amount of their fortunes would do more harm than good. At a time when half of American families can’t afford basic necessities, and 95 percent of the country understands that we’re in an affordability crisis, that’s going to be a tough sell.
A handful of billionaires led by Google cofounder Sergey Brin are out to prove that money can buy anything. They are pouring unprecedented resources into a political campaign to convince — or if that doesn’t work, to trick — California voters into prioritizing billionaires’ wealth over their own livelihoods.