SACRAMENTO, California — The chief advocate of a controversial measure to tax the wealth of California’s billionaires cast the proposal Tuesday as part of a national push to reach money “hoarded outside of the tax system,” arguing for a coordinated campaign against the country’s wealthiest residents.
“I think this is now a national campaign,” Dave Regan, the president of the powerful health care labor union SEIU-UHW, said at POLITICO’s The California Agenda: Sacramento Summit. “We knew this was provocative, we knew it would touch a nerve, but we completely underestimated how much interest and attention it would generate.”
When SEIU-UHW first began gathering signatures for a measure that would impose a one-time, 5 percent tax on the wealth of the state’s richest residents, Regan found himself isolated even within his own state…