A canonical reference,
not a campaign.
CABTA Coverage is an independent civic-data project on California Initiative 25-0024, the 2026 Billionaire Tax Act. Built and published by David T Phung under NLT143, the Matter vertical, focused on extraction, regulation, and capital flows. No advertisers, no paywall, no corporate sponsors, no campaign committee on either side.
By election day, anyone in California can know what they are voting on.
By November 3, 2026, every Californian who wants to know what they are voting on should be able to land here and walk away with a defensible understanding of the 2026 Billionaire Tax Act. Not the campaign version. Not the opposition mailer. The actual bill, the actual numbers, the actual money on both sides, with every figure traceable to a public document.
Each one should leave knowing more than when they arrived.
- A first-time voter
90 seconds before they fill in the bubble. The Story page and the Intro mode of every other route are written for them.
- A working journalist
Needs to verify a claim against the underlying source. Every figure on the site links to its primary publication. The Sources page is the index.
- A Sacramento staffer
Drafting a position memo for a member. Pro mode of every page surfaces the §-citations and the case law a memo would need to defend.
- A litigator
Preparing a constitutional challenge. The Story page's constitutional stress test maps each Meservey label to the relevant Supreme Court case with a graded verdict.
- A tax researcher
Checking the math against the published papers. The Calculator and Scenarios simulator both show their formulas; the Sources page links to Walczak, Galle, Rauh, and BSYZ.
- Reads every line of the AG-filed PDF and presents the bill in plain language alongside its verbatim text
- Tracks Polymarket prices, polling, and donor disclosures, refreshed daily
- Aggregates verified academic and journalistic sources across the spectrum
- Provides a calculator for both income (general audience) and net worth (covered taxpayer) cases
- Models multi-year budget impact under both the Galle and Walczak elasticity assumptions
- Documents the constitutional questions with citations to the Supreme Court cases that frame them
- Tell you how to vote
- Lobby legislators
- Take money from any organization with a stake in the outcome
- Hide its assumptions or methodology
- Render advocacy as analysis or analysis as advocacy
- Use the language of either side without naming whose language it is
Four rules that govern every line.
- Steelman both sides.
The strongest argument on each side is presented in its proponents' own framing. The voter case for raising revenue from billionaire wealth and the practitioner case against retroactive net-worth taxation both get the editorial space they deserve.
- Cite primary sources.
Every claim links to a public document, named author, and publication date. The Sources page is the index. Where a number is an estimate or a press attribution rather than a filing, the page says so.
- Disclose limits.
What is verified at the filing level and what is not yet pulled from a daily scrape is on the page, not in a footnote. The Funding page's Honesty block is the model.
- Update visibly.
Every meaningful change goes in the Changelog with a date stamp and a category tag. Donor schedules, polling, and source changes are appended, never silently overwritten.
Free to read. Voluntary to support.
No paywall, no signup wall, no email harvest. Every page is public, indexable, archive-ready, and survives the editor. The site is intended to be useful through November 3, 2026 and then to remain a permanent record.
Donations are accepted via /donate in Bitcoin, Ethereum, USDC, cbBTC, or Venmo. Not tax- deductible (this is not a 501(c)(3)). Every dollar received goes back into research, hosting, and editorial time. No donor receives editorial influence.
- X (formerly Twitter)@davidtphung
Direct messages and corrections. Fastest response time.
- Source list/sources
Every source on the site, tagged by perspective and category.
- Methodology/methodology
How donor totals, polls, market prices, and source citations are pulled and verified.
If a number on this site is wrong, the source wins.
Open the linked primary source. If it disagrees with what we show, we are wrong and we will fix it. DM @davidtphung or open an issue on GitHub.