The Brief

Proposition 40, also known as the billionaire tax, is the most contentious fight on Californians’ ballots this November.

The proposal to impose a one-time asset tax on the net worth of the state’s approximately 200 billionaires has divided Democrats, galvanized progressives and sparked fierce pushback from business groups and the state’s wealthy tech sector. Google co-founder Sergey Brin has poured more than $138 million into the campaign against the measure — including two countermeasures, Propositions 41 and 42 — and is among a handful of billionaires who have moved residences or business assets out of the state in an attempt to avoid the proposed tax. In total, opponents have raised more than $205 million to stop Prop. 40, according to campaign finance records.

It would also set up an entirely new system of taxes in a state that doesn’t traditionally tax wealth. That would be challenging to implement and experts say is sure to invite litigation. Here are some common questions and answers about how the measure would work.

How would the state assess the tax?

Aside from local taxes on real estate and some business equipment, California isn’t in the business of valuing and taxing personal property.

Prop. 40 would require the state, within six months, to create a way to assess the value of a wide range of holdings: billionaires’ stock, investment accounts and business interests, but also their art collections, wine vaults, cars and anything else that stores wealth.

“I have a client who has a machine gun collection,” said Jon Feldhammer, a San Francisco tax attorney who said he is advising several clients who would be or believe they could be subject to the billionaire tax.

The definition of wealth and property has to be broad to close possible loopholes, said Kirk Stark, a UCLA tax law professor.

“Otherwise there would be a very simple workaround, which is, if there’s something that’s exempt then you know there would be an incentive to just shift wealth from one form to another,” Stark said.

Ensuring those subject to the tax aren’t underreporting their assets would require the state’s Franchise Tax Board to hire more people for appraisals and auditing, Stark said.

“It can be done,” he said. “But it’s going to take a huge investment of resources to actually pull it off.”

Franchise Tax Board spokesperson Andrew LePage declined to say how many staff the agency would need to implement Prop. 40. Currently, the board doesn't appraise property but sometimes auditors "examine asset values reported by taxpayers to ensure accuracy," he said.

Chris Parker, a former attorney for the tax board who now works as a tax attorney with the firm Baker Tilly, said the board has “no way of knowing anyone’s net wealth.”

Ariel Jurow Kleiman, a tax policy professor at the University of Southern California, doesn’t think the state would have a hard time putting the tax into effect. Stocks, which make up a substantial part of billionaires’ wealth, are easily valued, she said. For more “bespoke” property like art and jewelry, California could look to the Internal Revenue Service’s federal tax on inherited property.

“There are commonsense methods like looking at comparable assets or looking to available markets to see how comps are valued,” she said. “We wouldn't be asking people to reinvent the wheel here.”

Experts do expect disputes over the value of privately held businesses.

Feldhammer said many startup founders have raised money for their companies but haven’t yet sold any products. He criticized the ballot measure for defining a company’s worth as the most recent amount of investment money it raised, which diverges from how the IRS calculates an asset’s fair market value for the estate tax.

“How do you value a company that is not on the public market? It doesn’t even have a product yet. It’s not making any money,” he said.

He said he expects clients to mount lengthy legal challenges arguing the law overvalues their business holdings.

“These are people who have oftentimes plenty of wealth to spend on legal fees to put up the best defense money can buy,” he said.

Will billionaires leave?

The campaign against the measure warns that billionaires will flee California, depriving the state of billions of dollars in income tax revenue that helps fund the state budget. Experts say there’s no way to know whether the tax will spark a large-scale exodus.

Joel Slemrod, a University of Michigan economics professor who studies tax policy, said there’s very little evidence to gauge how billionaires could react to California’s tax, partly because the proposal is unique.

California experts considering the tax have looked at wealth taxes in European countries to try to discern the impact of Prop. 40. In 1990, 12 countries had wealth taxes. Today, only four remain. Many countries abandoned them because they were difficult and expensive to implement, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development. But Slemrod said those examples are “not immediately applicable” to Prop. 40 because they differed significantly in design: Tax rates were much lower, they were intended to be permanent and the money was not earmarked for special interests.

“I wouldn’t jump from the evidence we have to California,” Slemrod said.

But one issue that could matter significantly for California, Slemrod said, is that it is much easier to move assets between states than between countries, as sometimes happened in Europe. Spain allowed its provinces to enact wealth taxes and research suggests that rich people changed residences based on tax rates.

Researchers at the Hoover Institution, a conservative policy think tank, conducted an analysis suggesting Californians need not look at history to figure out Prop. 40’s impact. Tax flight has already happened. They estimate that billionaires representing 30% of the tax base have publicly said they have left, lowering state revenue estimates by $60 billion and permanently altering California’s income tax collection.

Feldhammer, the tax lawyer, said “a third to half” of his clients have left the state over the proposed tax. He declined to say how many clients that is. Other tax lawyers told CalMatters that clients who are worth less than $1 billion are also considering moving to avoid limiting their earning potential.

Billionaires who didn’t leave before Jan. 1 would face taxes on their assets anyway; the measure would apply to anyone who was a California resident on that date.

But Feldhammer said he expects people to sue over the measure’s retroactive nature, pointing to two U.S. Supreme Court decisions from the 1920s that held it was unconstitutional to apply the federal estate and gift taxes to assets transferred before those laws were enacted. In 1994, the court ruled that retroactive taxes could be constitutional in certain limited circumstances.

Asked how he’s advising clients who are considering leaving California, Feldhammer said there’s a “reasonable argument that the law may be unconstitutionally retroactive — but to take advantage of that, you’re going to have to leave.”

Would it allow the state to tax my retirement?

If you’re not a billionaire, no.

Even for billionaires, Prop. 40 exempts pensions and individual retirement accounts from the asset tax. There are some exceptions, most notably for Roth IRAs that contain more than $10 million.

Misleading advertisements from opponents claim the tax would allow California soon to eat into retirement savings for average Californians. They’re supporting Prop. 42, which would block the proposed billionaire tax by broadly banning any new taxes on personal property such as investment, retirement and pension accounts. Brin’s political spending group, Building a Better California, put it on the ballot, and unions representing firefighters, police and construction workers support it. (If both measures pass, whichever receives more “yes” votes becomes law.)

Proponents of Prop. 42 say their measure would protect the pensions and retirement accounts of teachers, firefighters and middle-class workers from being taxed before they withdraw the money.

“A new tax on Californians’ retirement and life savings would be devastating,” Robert Gutierrez, president of the California Taxpayers Association, said in a press release.

There are no active proposals to tax those accounts on the ballot or in the Legislature. Lawmakers who have floated such wealth taxes in the past have gotten nowhere.

Still, Brian Marvel, president of the Peace Officers Research Association of California, which supports Prop. 42, denied being deceptive and said it’s “within the realm of realization” for California to tax middle-class workers’ retirement accounts.

“I think it’s more important to be proactive in this area,” he said.

How would the money be used?

Proponents say the billionaire tax is intended to backfill federal cuts to the state’s expansive Medi-Cal health program for low-income residents. State officials project the cuts, enacted as part of President Donald Trump’s 2025 budget bill known as H.R. 1, could amount to $30 billion a year.

The initiative gives the Legislature broad authority to decide how to spend the money. Of the revenue, 90% percent would be put in a special fund for healthcare; the other 10% would be put in a special fund to pay for schools and food assistance like CalFresh, which was also targeted by federal cuts.

If the money is used to keep Californians on Medi-Cal, that could mean spending it on the private health insurance companies that the state contracts with to administer low-income residents’ coverage.

There is some debate over whether the money would actually offset the cuts to Medi-Cal and how strictly the language bars lawmakers from using the money for anything else.

Opponents such as the California Medical Association and Planned Parenthood recently circulated a memo arguing there’s no guarantee the money would replace the federal funding cuts, because the proposition also allows the money to offset state cuts to Medi-Cal. They warn that would allow lawmakers and the governor to use the new tax money to maintain state funding levels for Medi-Cal and free up the state’s general fund to pay for other things.

Lawmakers and governors have in the past used special new funds to simply replace existing funding. Then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, did it with mental health funding created by a voter-approved tax on millionaires, and then-Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, did it with health funding created by the state tobacco tax. More recently, doctors and hospitals accused Newsom of using a different healthcare tax to backfill the general fund. They placed Proposition 35 on the ballot in 2024 to earmark the money. Voters approved it, but the groups say some funding was still diverted.

But proponents of Prop. 40 said that concern doesn’t make sense: Those budget maneuvers, they said, are usually done to address state budget shortfalls, while Prop. 40 was already written to create funding for a shortfall.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

Countries are not doing enough to cut emissions that cause climate change, according to a new report from United Nations scientists. And the United States is a big part of the problem.

The U.S. sticks out as the only major economy where planet-warming pollution increased dramatically last year, the report notes.

Among the world's largest emitters of greenhouse gases, the U.S. was tied last year with Russia for the most emissions per capita. China emits significantly more total greenhouse gases each year than the U.S., but has more than four times the population.

Overall, global emissions were basically the same last year as they were the previous year.

U.S. emissions grew because of increased electricity demand, as well as Trump administration policies that support the burning of fossil fuels. The Trump administration has ordered coal-fired power plants in the U.S. to stay open longer than planned, rolled back fuel-efficiency standards for vehicles and ended tax credits for solar and wind projects.

Those policies have made the U.S. an outlier when it comes to escalating greenhouse gas emissions, says Inger Andersen, the executive director of the U.N. Environment Programme.

"Right now, everybody is scrambling a little bit regarding energy security," Andersen says, pointing to global oil and gas disruptions stemming from the wars in Ukraine and Iran.

Despite the geopolitical upheaval, "several G20 members have shown sustained emissions reduction," she notes.

That includes the European Union, which has invested heavily in energy-efficient appliances and renewable electricity sources such as wind and solar, partly in reaction to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

The U.S. is pulling out of U.N. climate work

The Trump administration has withdrawn from the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, and is working to remove the U.S. from all U.N. climate work, arguing the international system imposes unfair burdens on Americans. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency now says greenhouse gases do not pose a threat to human health and welfare, reversing its previous position.

The new report includes a statement from the U.S. government, saying the U.S. "does not endorse or agree with its analysis or conclusions, and has not provided comments to this report." The U.S. State Department did not respond to NPR's questions.

The new report, which is compiled annually by an international group of scientists, comes less than a month before global climate talks kick off in Turkey. World leaders will gather to discuss how to speed investments in clean energy and how to pay for the costs of dealing with climate change. The Trump administration will not participate in those talks.

Still, whether or not American leaders formally participate in international climate efforts, the effects of America's reliance on oil, gas and coal are being felt around the world, the U.N. warns. Burning fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, trapping extra heat that warms the entire planet. The effects of all that pollution are felt globally.

The Earth is about 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) warmer on average than it was in the mid-1800s, according to the World Meteorological Organization. That warming is driving widespread disasters, from deadly heat waves and floods to more intense storms and wildfires.

"All countries, especially the big emitters, must do more," says U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. "Every fraction of a degree matters."

The Earth is on track for 5 degrees Fahrenheit of warming this century

Right now, the planet is on track for upwards of 5 degrees Fahrenheit (2.8 degrees Celsius) of warming this century, which would cause catastrophic impacts, such as massive sea level rise and the mass extinction of plants and animals, the report warns.

The U.N. Paris Climate agreement sets a goal of limiting warming to well below 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius), in the hopes of avoiding such cataclysms.

This is the first year the annual report has acknowledged that even lower targets are now out of reach. However, it finds it is still possible to keep warming below 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, if global greenhouse gas emissions fall by about 25% in the next decade.

But countries are currently lagging far behind that goal.

Under the Paris agreement, about two thirds of countries have submitted formal, up-to-date plans for cutting their greenhouse gas emissions. If they all follow through on those plans, it would reduce emissions by about 15% in the next decade — far less than the 25% needed.

Copyright 2026 NPR

At Chopin Noodle House in Monterey Park's Atlantic Times Square, the dining room is small. But there's still room for a baby grand piano.

If you’re lucky, you might catch owner Zi Yang playing for customers as they work through bowls of Lanzhou beef noodle soup. A few feet away, cooks pull a fresh batch of noodles by hand, made to each diner’s preferred thickness.

The traditional beef noodle soup at Chopin Noodle House in Monterey Park comes with clear broth, chili oil, sliced beef, leeks, and cilantro.

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Gab Chabrán

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LAist

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Noodles are pulled by hand to order at Chopin Noodle House.

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Gab Chabrán

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LAist

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Pianists turned chefs 

Yang and his wife, Mimi Song, are both former piano teachers who met through music.

After moving from China to the U.S., they hoped to make a living teaching piano, but it didn’t pay the bills. So they turned to another love: noodles.

Co-founders Mimi Song (left) and Zi Yang, both former piano teachers, have grown Chopin Noodle House to five locations.

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Courtesy Chopin Noodle House

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The couple opened the first Chopin Noodle House in Catonsville, Maryland, in 2023. They later expanded to Southern California, starting in Chino, and opened in Monterey Park in March. The chain now has five locations in Maryland, Virginia and Southern California.

When I visited, Yang stepped out from behind the counter, sat down at the baby grand and played Frédéric Chopin’s Waltz in C-sharp minor, its soft, rolling melody filling the small dining room. A group of diners in the corner looked up from their bowls of noodles, watched and cheered when he finished.

The restaurant name comes from the Polish composer. “We both love Chopin,” Yang said.

The Lanzhou connection

Yang is from Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu province in northwest China, and the birthplace of the signature beef noodle soup.

“I was born in Lanzhou, a city along China’s ancient Silk Road,” he writes on the restaurant’s website. “Every morning, the streets fill with the scent of beef broth and the rhythm of pulled noodles slapping the counter.”

“Maybe 80% of the people eat it for breakfast or lunch,” he told me.

Before opening the restaurant, he returned to China for a crash course in its creation.

“I went back to learn how to pull the noodles and how to make the very delicious beef noodle soup,” he said.

The piano started as a practical idea.

“We saw that restaurant life would be so boring, so we decided to put a piano in our restaurant. So sometimes if there’s no customer, we can practice the piano,” Yang said.

What’s in the bowl

The most popular order is the traditional beef noodle soup ($14.99). It's made from beef bones and beef shank.

Diners choose from eight noodle styles, from extra-thin to extra-wide, plus knife-sliced and gluten-free rice noodles. The bowl follows what the restaurant calls Lanzhou’s five signature elements: clear beef broth, white radish, red chili oil, green cilantro and leek, as well as golden hand-pulled noodles topped with thinly sliced beef.

For sipping alongside the noodles, order the eight treasures tea, known in Lanzhou as san pao tai. It’s served in a lidded bowl called a gaiwan and brewed with green tea, dried red dates, goji berries, longan, raisins, rose petals, chrysanthemum and rock sugar. You use the lid to keep the fruit and leaves in place as you drink. It’s naturally sweet, a nice counterpoint to the chili oil.

An open bench

Anyone who visits is welcome to play the piano. Yang said they’ve had everyone from kids learning to play to professional musicians, including members of the San Gabriel Valley Symphony.

Some of the players are so good that Yang admits he’s now a little shy about taking his turn.

“I’m afraid to play because they are so good,” he said.

Longer droughts, more extreme heat, greater wildfire risk and more beach erosion: A new state-commissioned report finds that climate change is likely to reshape the Southern California landscape and way of life.

The study, which comes as part of California’s fifth statewide climate change assessment, includes more detailed models than previous reports.

“What we want to highlight with this report is not how doom and gloom everything is, but just to look at climate change in the L.A. area as something that is inevitable, but which we can adapt to, and in particular, protect the most vulnerable,” said UCLA climate researcher Jesse Norris, the lead author of the report focused on Los Angeles.

Sea level rise and beach erosion

If the recent stories of beach and coastline erosion have you concerned, buckle up. The report notes local coastal erosion rates are expected to triple by 2050.

Citing past research, the authors also note that coastal flooding is expected to quickly intensify in the mid-2030s and become a yearly event by the mid-21st century.

Between one-third and two-thirds of the region’s beaches are expected to be lost in the next 75 years.

Researchers found that in L.A. County, about 1,700 housing units are at risk of being permanently inundated. But if sea levels rise by 3.3 feet — which is possible by 2100 — 9,000 units would be at risk of being permanently flooded.

And if sea levels rise by 6.6 feet, which researchers described as an “extreme” scenario, flooding could be widespread during a 100-year wave event. In this scenario, large swaths of urban L.A. and Orange counties could be flooded, though it’s important to note the projections don’t account for any future infrastructure that may be built.

Extreme heat

Temperatures are expected to rise 4 degrees Fahrenheit between 2041 and 2070 — adding to the 4 degrees of warming that have already happened since 1900.

Researchers say those effects are more pronounced in inland areas, which are also projected to see more days of extreme heat. The average hottest day of the year is expected to rise to 115 degrees by midcentury.

Microclimates play a role

Most of the hazards predicted in the report will be familiar to Southern Californians, even as the effects are expected to intensify and become more common during climate change.

“It was quite striking to see how much more vulnerable certain locations are than others to different climate hazards,” Norris said. “In particular, the more inland areas being far more vulnerable to the increase in extreme heat, mountain communities being far more vulnerable to the impacts of extreme rain and flooding as well as reduced snowpack, and coastal areas being obviously far more vulnerable to the impacts of rising seas.”

Planning

Norris stressed that planning for these effects can be undertaken now. One example: increasing tree cover to mitigate heat.

“A lot of inland cities are thinking very seriously about increasing their tree canopies, increasing the ability for people to have shade as they're going about their business,” Norris said.

Norris highlighted the importance of protecting the most vulnerable in these situations, including people experiencing homelessness and those who work outdoors, and ensuring access to air conditioning and cooling centers.

Norris also said continuing and improving initiatives like active wildfire management, water management and coastal adaptation will be vital in the years to come.

Two weeks from the midterm elections, Democratic Party leaders are suing in federal court to block President Donald Trump’s administration from usurping states’ authority to administer elections or trying to intimidate state and local election officials into complying with illegal demands.

The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in Washington, seeks a court order barring the administration from purging legally registered voters from statewide voter registration lists or denying ballots to legally registered voters.

The plaintiffs, including Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, also ask for a ruling that the administration has illegally threatened state election officials with prosecution before the Nov. 3 election.

The lawsuit cites the Justice Department’s recent actions in California, where it sued to block state election officials from counting mail-in ballots cast by people whom the federal government has identified as “likely” noncitizens until their immigration status can be confirmed.

“For over a decade now, President Donald J. Trump has bombarded the American people with lies and misinformation about American elections and voter fraud,” the suit says. “While these lies have been debunked at every turn, that has never deterred the President from employing them as a pretext to seize control over elections, even as courts overwhelmingly reject that effort.”

The Justice Department said in a statement that election integrity is a top priority for the administration and the department’s actions on that front are grounded in law and under court litigation.

The Democratic leaders’ lawsuit was assigned to Chief Judge James Boasberg, who has been vilified by the White House for rulings against the Trump administration since the start of the Republican president’s second term.

The suit’s other plaintiffs are the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic Governors Association. Its named defendants are Trump, the Justice Department, Attorney General Todd Blanche, the Department of Homeland Security and DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin.