The Brief

California voters will soon decide whether to tax billionaires — but even if a majority says yes, the measure could still lose to either of two billionaire-funded measures designed to cancel it out.

The billionaire-backed group Building a Better California designed two countermeasures to undermine the wealth tax and create multiple ways to defeat it.

Recent polling shows slim majorities of likely voters support not just the wealth tax, Proposition 40, but also Propositions 41 and 42, the measures aimed at killing it, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.

“I don’t think that people at this point realize they're direct countermeasures because there hasn't been much said about 41 and 42,” said Mark Baldassare, polling director for PPIC.

Only one outcome can prevail. If Prop. 40 captures more votes than both 41 and 42, the wealth tax takes effect, voiding the countermeasures. If either 41 or 42 outpolls Prop. 40, the billionaire tax does not take effect.

What each measure does

Prop. 40 would levy a one-time 5% tax on California residents whose net worth exceeds $1 billion. The tax would apply based on residency as of Jan. 1, 2026 — a date that had passed when the measure qualified for the ballot — meaning billionaires who left the state afterward would still owe it.

Most of the money generated would fund healthcare, while a smaller portion would go to education. Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West, the primary proponent and financial backer of the measure, says the tax would raise about $100 billion and is needed to backfill federal healthcare cuts passed last year. Conservatives argue California’s Medi-Cal program has grown too expensive, and new federal policies will help the state cut back.

Prop. 41’s real target is Prop. 40: It would require new tax proposals passed after the start of this year to follow the state’s annual spending limit — a cap passed by voters in 1979 during a period of strong anti-tax sentiment that recent voter-approved special taxes have exempted themselves from. The billionaire tax would automatically violate this provision because it isn’t written to comply with the state spending limit.

Prop 41 would also require the nonpartisan state auditor to review new tax proposals before they reach voters and identify potential spending cuts in the programs they’d fund. If voters approve a tax, some of the revenue generated would pay for the audit; if a proposal fails, the state would be on the hook for the additional cost.

Prop. 42 would bar new taxes on personal property such as businesses, investments, retirement accounts, trusts and art collections — the exact things that Prop. 40 targets. It would also prohibit retroactive taxes, which would block a key part of Prop. 40: taxing wealth accumulated before the measure takes effect. Either provision alone is enough to nullify Prop. 40, if the wealth tax wins fewer votes than 41 or 42.

“Prop. 42 is a more direct anti-wealth tax proposal,” said Megan Jones, a tax attorney with Holland and Knight. The Legislature has tried unsuccessfully in the past to pass multiple wealth taxes, Jones said. If Prop. 42 passes, she said, it could limit lawmakers’ ability to try again in the future.

Who’s funding the fights

Backers of the billionaire tax — primarily SEIU-UHW — have raised about $31 million to pass the measure, mostly from union coffers. The California Democratic Party also supports the measure.

Gov. Gavin Newsom, along with doctors’ groups and clinics, opposes Prop. 40. Newsom argues the tax would not create a long-term solution to California’s budget woes and will drive wealthy people and businesses the state relies on through income taxes out of the state, further reducing revenue.

Sergey Brin, the Google co-founder, and other billionaires are bankrolling the opposition campaign, ploughing more than $56 million into the No on Prop. 40 committee through a political organization called Building a Better California. That same group is the primary financial backer for both Propositions 41 and 42, raising $131 million to campaign for those measures. In total, the billionaire-backed group has gathered more than $187 million to try to defeat Prop. 40.

Baldassare said the billionaire tax's backers will have a difficult time overcoming voter confusion about the three competing measures.

Supported by the California Health Care Foundation (CHCF), which works to ensure that people have access to the care they need, when they need it, at a price they can afford. Visit www.chcf.org to learn more.

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

Museums around the world serve as a lens into human history, culture, scientific achievement and more.

But that fancy-schmancy description gives a sort of “high prestige" to collections of art and expression which, after all, are created and perceived subjectively.

Because artists have always pushed the boundaries of what art can or should be — we asked listeners of AirTalk, LAist 89.3's daily news show, to share their favorite less-traditional museums. Here are some of their picks — all driving distance — and why they love them, in their own words.

The Museum of Jurassic Technology (Culver City)

It features an unorthodox mixture of artistic, scientific and historic technological items, as well as some unclassifiable exhibits, including cabinets of curiosities that were the 16th-century predecessors of modern natural-history museums.

The Museum of Jurassic Technology

(

Sascha Pohflepp

/

Wikimedia Creative Commons

)

Learn about hours and admission here.

Velaslavasay Panorama (University Park)

This nonprofit exhibition hall features a garden in and around a historic theater located right in the heart of University Park. It's famous for having the only hand-painted 360-degree panorama in the country.

Why Hannah in North University Park loves it:

Learn about hours and admission here.

Lincoln Memorial Shrine (Redlands)

A research facility and museum dedicated to the late president and the Civil War.

Why Megan in Pomona loves it:

Musée Mécanique (San Francisco)

One of the largest privately owned collections of 20th century antique arcade games, fortune tellers and coin-op machines, some of which you can still play. It's located right on Pier 45 in San Francisco’s Fisherman's Wharf.

Learn about hours and admission here.

Musical Instrument Museum (Phoenix, AZ)

With one of the biggest houses of instruments in the world, it features instruments and musical artifacts from roughly 200 different countries.

Why Lindsey in Koreatown loves it: 

Worker pay at the country’s largest four-year public university is uneven, with some employees earning well below and others above national averages.

The findings from a new compensation report show two truths: Overall, unionized staff and faculty compensation at the California State University is on par with national averages for similar public universities, but about a third of workers’ total salary and benefits are below national averages. Between 13% and 19% of workers earn well above the average. The report also found that workers at Bay Area campuses are generally underpaid after factoring in the higher wages employers tend to pay in the region.

The Cal State chancellor’s office paid the Segal Group, a human resources research firm, a little more than $1 million for the 27-page report, according to a Cal State spokesperson, Amy Bentley-Smith.

The conclusions are likely to factor heavily in ongoing and increasingly charged contract negotiations between Cal State and its largest unions, which are demanding raises that currently far exceed what the Cal State system is willing to pay. Cal State has budgeted for 4% raises this year; unions are seeking roughly double that or more.

A Cal State trustee Wednesday said the report shows the university system is on the right track, but it leaves her with concerns that workers with the lowest salaries struggle to pay for California’s high living costs. Benefits, while generous, cannot alone pay for basic needs or allow workers to live close to campus, said trustee Leslie Gilbert-Lurie.

“We want them to be able to have food, and we want them to be able to have housing,” she said. “And so I want to be sure that our base salaries at these lowest levels align with what it means to live in California.”

Dozens of representatives from four labor groups briefly shut down the Cal State trustees meeting Tuesday after chanting “no contract, no peace” and “if we don’t get it, shut it down” during the public comment period. All trustees and campus presidents left the meeting space during the demonstration. As the system leaders were exiting, one worker yelled, “Don’t walk out on us!”

Adding to the tension is data that shows 91% of the roughly billion dollars the system got in new money from the state and tuition increases between 2021 and 2025 went toward wage raises for union members. Cal State trustee Julia Lopez first cited the figure at the July meeting, suggesting that steering the majority of new funds to wages is why campuses battled deficits — they struggled to handle all their other growing expenses.

“That's why every single campus had to really look at their budgets and figure out how to make the adjustments that they needed to live within the money that we were sending to them, and that's why there's so much pain in the system,” she said. Lopez co-chaired a working group in 2023 that determined the system is shortchanging its students by not spending enough on academic support and student services, such as libraries and counseling.

Cal State received a record amount of extra taxpayer funding this year, something the unions say was at least partly due to their advocating with state lawmakers. Union leaders are angry their efforts aren’t yet translating into higher wage increases. Meanwhile, Cal State campus presidents received raises of 10% to 20% last year, on top of additional potential bonuses — another source of ire for union leaders.

What unions want

In an interview a few hours after the Tuesday worker protest, a senior union official said that her members don’t want to strike. But they will “strike if they have to for what's right because a temporary, you know, economic hardship will solve years and years of economic disparity,” said Jessica Dalton, vice president for representation for CSU Employees Union. The union represents over 36,000 support staff, student assistants, and healthcare, technical, and administrative workers.

The union seeks a 7% raise for all its non-student workers in 2026 plus other increases for some totalling an 11.8% increase and a 5% raise in 2027. Cal State countered with a 1.2% increase in 2026 and 4% in 2027. The union wants every eligible worker to receive automatic 2% raises annually if they stay at their positions, a concept known as step increases. Cal State, Dalton said, has opposed automatic step increases and instead wants to move workers up only after signing new labor contracts.

A third of workers are on lower pay steps than they should be based on their experience levels.

The faculty union representing 29,000 professors, lecturers and other employees wants predictable, annual raises that equal inflation plus two percentage points. Cal State instead proposes 3% increases for this year and next. The union also wants the lowest-paid workers to earn at least 10% of the $795,000 salary that Cal State’s chancellor, Mildred Garcia, receives. Right now the lowest-paid faculty receive around $66,000 annually.

The report states that median Cal State salaries for unionized workers are actually 1% below the national average, but the system’s health and retirement benefits are generally more generous than those at other schools, making the overall compensation of workers about 3% above the national average.

Unions and university officials disagree over whether Cal State’s proposals will make health benefits more expensive. For CSU Employees Union, Cal State negotiators want to impose a new $5 monthly fee to workers that would grow to $20 for an additional two dependents in 2029. Dalton already pays $100 a month for her health insurance, she said. The extra charges would eat into the raises Cal State is offering, she added. But Cal State notes that employees on the most popular plan, through Kaiser Permanente, will see their health insurance costs drop by $13 to about $150 per month between 2026 and 2027.

Amanda Harrison, a lecturer of English and queer studies at Cal State Northridge, said her health insurance is almost $1,000 a month for herself and her partner — 14% of her salary. In 2018 it was $138 for the same plan, she said. The current rate should be much lower, she contends. Harrison is a cancer survivor and wants the more expensive PPO to access hospitals with research centers. She taught at Santa Monica College and knows faculty there with identical plans who pay nothing.

For the faculty union, Cal State wants to propose a working group to re-evaluate how much the system pays for health benefits. Cal State officials say this group will have no authority to change how much workers will pay for their benefits. But the union is alarmed.

“This would be an unfathomable take-back, causing a reduction in buying power and eroding already low wages,” wrote faculty negotiator Kevin Wehr in an email. He leads the bargaining team for the faculty union and is a sociology professor at Sacramento State. The union is in a dispute with the system over its contract. The next stage of negotiations would permit strikes.

Cal State calculates that its health benefits spending will rise by $81 million between 2026 and 2027.

Union criticism of report

The faculty union is critical of the compensation report because it didn’t consider the much higher cost of living in California compared to other states. The report only considered the higher cost of labor in the state. The differences can be extreme. The report states workers in San Francisco should earn 18% more than workers in Bakersfield. But public calculators show that the cost of living is 50% higher in San Francisco than in Bakersfield.

In a written statement, a spokesperson for Cal State’s Office of the Chancellor, Jason Maymon, defended using cost of labor rather than cost of living. “Cost of living can vary significantly between locations and is an important consideration for employees, but it addresses affordability rather than the market competitiveness of compensation,” he wrote. “Because the purpose of this study was to compare CSU compensation with the external labor market, cost of labor was the appropriate measure for the analysis.”

Another report on non-unionized staff is due by the end of the year. Cal State published a similar report on executive compensation in 2025.

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

When kids start attending school, the youngest tend to get sick their first year. Some may have a tough time adjusting to a new school routine. Some parents may believe missing the day’s lesson isn’t that big of a deal, so their student stays home.

But when young students miss school, the days absent can quickly add up and impact student learning. About 24% of California’s youngest students were chronically absent in 2024-25, higher than the 19% chronic absenteeism rate for all students.

In October, the state will release data on chronic absenteeism from the 2025-26 school year, the first school year transitional kindergarten, or TK, was widely available for all families. Education experts and administrators will be zeroing in on attendance rates among the very youngest.

Down from a COVID-19 peak

California’s expanded TK: What’s working and what isn’t

Chronic absenteeism is defined as missing 10% or more days in one school year. The overall rate has improved since the percentage of students in that category hit a peak of 30% of all students in the 2021-22 school year in California.

But the rate has remained high among TK and kindergarten students. That matters, early education researchers say, because the effects of not attending school regularly in the earliest years can show up in lower academic achievement years later.

“If they are missing school, they are missing out on the building blocks and it will impact them for the rest of their lives,” said Jessica Hull, executive director of communication and community engagement at Roseville City School District near Sacramento.

In many ways, it makes sense that the youngest students have spotty attendance. They tend to get sick more often so higher rates of absenteeism are largely expected, say school administrators. This can be especially true for students who did not attend preschool or other early learning programs prior to TK.

“When your child starts school, that’s usually a year of sickness,” said Kara Stern, director of education at SchoolStatus, an education technology company that works with 123 California school districts on chronic absenteeism.

Illnesses such as colds — sometimes even monthly, according to SchoolStatus data — are often part of the TK and kindergarten experience because “it’s a first exposure to all these other kids,” said Stern.

Long lasting effects of missing school

Some families are unaware of the foundational learning that happens every day in TK and kindergarten classrooms, said Hull.

“It doesn’t feel like it’s a requirement to attend each day,” she said. And since the COVID-19 pandemic, parents have had difficulty discerning when a child might be sick enough to keep home from school, she said.

“It’s hard to send a 4-year-old to school if they have a runny nose,” said Hull.

Recent research shows that students who are chronically absent in TK and kindergarten are about twice as likely to transfer school districts and that kindergarteners’ ability to read and do basic math can be predictive of academic achievement by third grade and beyond. Part of that may be that students and families build routines in TK and kindergarten — establishing a wake up time, getting to school on time, socializing with classmates — which helps with attendance as students grow older.

‘Absences sneak up on families’

A student who is chronically absent, and attends a typical 180-day school year, has missed about 3.5 weeks of school.

In 2021-22 when schools began reopening after COVID-related closures, nearly 2 million of the state’s TK-12 students were chronically absent. California districts launched a years-long campaign to get students back into the classroom.

One of them was Roseville City, a 12,000-student district in Placer County. The district mailed letters to families explaining the importance of attendance, created graphics detailing how quickly absences can add up, and called families whose children were often absent.

In communications with parents, the district said it’s fine to keep a sick child home, but they can send them to school “if they are a little under the weather.”

The messaging worked. In three years, the district’s overall chronic absence rates dropped from nearly 26% in 2021-22 to 10.5% in 2024-25 despite an increase in total enrollment, according to state data.

But the district’s TK and kindergarten students were still missing class at alarming rates — at its peak in 2022-23 their chronic absence rate was 11 percentage points higher than the rest of the district, state data shows.

Last year, Roseville City focused its attendance communications on TK and kindergarten. The letters to those families described what their children were learning each day in class and how those lessons were the building blocks to reading, math, writing and science.

On the district’s website, staff has also listed the building blocks children learn in early grades: hand-eye coordination in TK turns to learning sight words in kindergarten, writing sentences in first grade and writing short paragraphs in second grade. This is all part of educating parents on the value of their youngest children being in class, Hull said.

District staff have learned that “absences sneak up on families,” Hull said. Families are not keeping track of the number of days, so the schools need to point out the amount of time a student is missing. “That’s on our part to reach out and explain,” she said.

This school year, Roseville City’s communication to families about absenteeism are more tailored to the individual student.

Hull said that a letter might say “it’s been two months of the school year and you’ve already missed 5 days. You’re on track to be chronically absent. What can we do?” The most important part of that message, she said, is showing families the district is ready to help.

That early intervention is critical, said Stern of SchoolStatus, which works with Roseville City. Once students become chronically absent, her team has found that re-engaging them becomes much more difficult, especially as they grow older.

“Our data suggests that reaching out in the window of three to five absences is a lot more effective in returning them to school and not needing further intervention than waiting until it’s more set in stone,” said Stern.

SchoolStatus’ internal data for the 2025-26 school year seems promising. In 97 of the California districts they work with, the TK chronic absenteeism rate dropped under 22% from nearly 29% in 2023-24. Among kindergarteners it dropped to about 20% from nearly 25% during the same two-year timeframe.

“It’s a lot of extra work, but our entire system is so determined and focused on this because they do see that end result,” said Hull of Roseville City. “They see the kids who return to school are doing better both academically and socially.”

The average 30-year fixed-rate mortgage leaped to 7.03% on Thursday, according to the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp., which also goes by Freddie Mac.
This is the first time the rate has passed the 7% mark in 20 months, or since January 2025. While the 7% mortgage rate milestone holds no literal significance beyond the psychological effect of the round number, the sharp rise in rates since March risks further squeezing the budgets of homebuyers. And it's bound to deepen the freeze on a housing market held stagnant for years by the high cost of homeownership.

Mortgage rates tend to follow the 10-year Treasury note, which has risen sharply over the summer amid concerns about high inflation as well as the size of the federal debt.

The Federal Reserve last week raised its benchmark interest rate by a quarter percentage point — its first move this year — and many policymakers projected it may raise it one more time before year's end. Investors are bracing for potentially even more rate hikes to help fight inflation.

The housing market is hurting

High mortgage rates contributed to a 2% decline in existing home sales in August from the previous month, according to the National Association of Realtors.

The median sale for an existing home was about $429,000. At that price, a single percentage point increase in the mortgage rate can cost buyers hundreds of additional dollars a month and tens of thousands over the life of the loan.

Housing researchers had hoped 2026 would provide a break for buyers and sellers waiting for cheaper rates and those savings. For a brief moment, that seemed to happen as mortgage rates fell below 6% by the end of February.

But they quickly shot back up with the war with Iran, which has led to volatility in the bond markets. Continued fighting has also prolonged worries about inflation, further helping push up mortgage rates.
Copyright 2026 NPR