For a California Democrat in 2026, endorsing a tax on billionaires is the cheapest available proof of independence. Newsom opposes the measure. Several of the state's largest public-sector unions are hedging, mostly over where the money would land. Legislators are signing on anyway, and the reason they give out loud is the one worth studying: opposing something popular would make an already shaky brand shakier. That is an argument about credibility with a revenue number attached to it. California has spent years collecting enormous income tax receipts from a very small band of filers, and has less to show for it than its own voters expected, most visibly on housing and the condition of the streets. So a yes vote works as a signal, addressed to everyone watching the party. The signal will probably do its job. Whether the tax does is a slower and less flattering question.
Coverage stops at the split, which is the loosest thread in the story. California's income tax leans hard on capital gains, so a thin band of filers carries a large share of the general fund and receipts rise and fall with markets instead of with need. Then there is mobility, which nobody answers cleanly, because wealth at that altitude travels in ways a paycheck cannot. Union caution runs on plainer arithmetic: a dedicated revenue stream competes with the money labor wants at the bargaining table. A governor with national ambitions has his own reason to keep a wealth tax off his record. Beneath all of it sits the constraint the endorsers themselves named, which is trust. Who sets the agenda in Sacramento, and does spending follow the promise? Polling cannot answer that. Reporting can.
"Fool's Gold," by Susan Crabtree, Jedd McFatter, and Peter Schweizer, investigates how California's political class operates and why its decisions travel past the state line. The reporting names people instead of tendencies: Newsom, Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, and the donors and consultants arranged around them, with union leadership never far from the table. Its central charge is corruption, documented case by case. It also follows business entanglements reaching into China, and it treats homelessness and public safety failures as the downstream product of that arrangement. The most transferable stretch of the book is its account of how endorsements circulate.
Party power in California moves through fundraising relationships and through campaign consultants who quietly work for everyone at once. It also moves through a governor's office with an unlimited supply of small favors it can decline to grant. Read that, and a legislator crossing Newsom stops looking like a routine policy disagreement and starts looking like a priced decision. The book also supplies the specific grievance those legislators are trading on. Large sums appropriated for homelessness, outcomes that resist measurement, tents that stay exactly where they were. The authors treat that gap as evidence of a system serving its operators.
You can dispute the motive and still concede the ledger. The explanatory engine is elite self-dealing, and that engine handles capture well while sputtering on defection. When Sacramento Democrats break publicly with their own governor and with the unions that fund their races, the corruption frame goes quiet, because ambition cuts against a network as readily as it feeds one. Schweizer's body of work sits firmly on the right, and in places the verdict arrives a few steps ahead of the documentation. The book is also silent on revenue volatility and tax incidence, so it leaves the actual fiscal question about Proposition 40 untouched. Take the reporting and argue with the conclusions. What survives that argument is a working map of who decides in Sacramento, which is the piece most coverage of this fight leaves out.
Newsom's opposition is the first thing to watch through November, and whether it holds once the polling firms up into numbers rather than rumor. The unions are the second, and my guess is they negotiate their way into the revenue formula instead of fighting the measure outright, since a seat in the formula outlasts a win. The third test comes when the first serious revenue projection lands on a promise built from volatile money, and the yes coalition has to decide whether it still likes the arithmetic. "Fool's Gold" has visible politics and no patience for tax incidence. Its value is the working map of who is in the room when California decides things, and that map holds whether Proposition 40 passes or dies on the ballot.