Five California propositions ask the same question: Who should pay billions in taxes?

There are 14 statewide measures on California’s Nov. 3 ballot, ranging widely in concept and potential impact. Five of them pose a fundamental question: Who should pay hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes to support local public services?

The centerpiece is Proposition 40, which would levy a 5% tax on the personal wealth of about 200 California billionaires, mostly to bolster healthcare programs.

It’s drawing national attention as potentially the first U.S. tax on wealth, and its passage would ignite epic legal battles and efforts to extend its concept to other states and perhaps the nation as a whole.

Not since voters passed Proposition 13, an iconic property tax limit, in 1978 and touched off tax revolts in other states has a California measure potentially affected America’s taxation policies so broadly.

Many millions of dollars are being spent to sway voters on Prop. 40 and two other measures, Proposition 41 and Proposition 42. The latter two were placed on the ballot by Prop. 40’s ultra-wealthy opponents to counteract the wealth tax’s effects.

Two other tax measures facing voters, Proposition 3 and Proposition 43, are, in effect, new versions of previous conflicts.

Prop. 3 is the ideological cousin of Prop. 40’s underlying rationale that wealthy Californians should be taxed heavily to maintain vital services. The state’s income tax rates already embody that concept, resulting in high-income taxpayers providing most of the revenue from that system.

In 2012, with the state budget awash in red ink, Gov. Jerry Brown and voters added another income surtax onto the highest earners to close the budget’s shortfall. Brown promised that surtax would be temporary, but later a coalition of public employee unions, led by the California Teachers Association, sponsored a ballot measure that extended it to 2030.

Prop. 3 makes the surtax — raising somewhere between $5 billion and $15 billion a year — permanent. The union’s allies in the Legislature and Gov. Gavin Newsom improved its chances of passage by elevating it to a top position on the ballot, though union officials were concerned the Prop. 40 conflict could undermine Prop. 3’s chances for approval.

Finally there is Prop. 43, which embodies the philosophically opposite position on taxes, that they should be limited and relatively difficult to enact, harkening back to Prop. 13 nearly a half-century ago.

In 1996 voters passed Proposition 218, extending Prop. 13’s requirement of two-thirds vote for “special taxes” that local governments sought to finance specific services.

It was assumed the two-thirds threshold also would apply to taxes placed on the ballot via initiative petitions. However, in 2017, the state Supreme Court, in a case dealing with a local marijuana tax, obliquely suggested that special taxes proposed by initiative need only a simple majority approval.

That touched off several years of legal confusion, including lower court rulings that disagreed with each other. Finally, in 2020, the Supreme Court endorsed exempting taxes via petitions from the two-thirds rule by refusing to take up an appellate court ruling.

Since then, hundreds of special tax increases — mostly sales taxes — have been enacted with simple majority votes, and dozens more are pending because, if passed, Prop. 43 would reinstate the two-thirds vote requirement.

It’s the latest of several efforts by tax limitation groups to overturn the indirect Supreme Court ruling, including an effort that the Supreme Court itself cancelled in 2024.

This year’s effort was initially much broader, but a last-minute deal whittled it down to limit certain local taxes in return for legislators’ dropping a measure that would have required anti-tax measures to meet a two-thirds threshold.

Prop. 43’s outcome could finally put an end to the long-running local tax conflict, but don’t count on it. Quarreling over who should be taxed is one of California’s perpetual political games.