WASHINGTON — As progressives seek to place a new tax on billionaires on California’s November ballot, a Republican congressman is moving in the opposite direction — proposing federal legislation that would block states from taxing the assets of former residents.

Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-Rocklin), who faces a tough re-election challenge under California’s redrawn congressional maps, says he will introduce the “Keep Jobs in California Act of 2026” on Friday. The measure would prohibit any state from levying taxes retroactively on individuals who no longer live there.

The proposed legislation adds another layer to what has already been a fiery debate over California’s approach to taxing the ultra-wealthy. It has created divisions among Democrats and has placed Los Angeles at the center of a broader political fight, with Bernie Sanders set to hold a rally on Wednesday night in support of the wealth tax.

Kiley said he drafted the bill in reaction to reports that several of California’s most prominent billionaires — including Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin — are planning to leave the state in anticipation of the wealth tax being enacted.

“California’s proposed wealth tax is an unprecedented attempt to chase down people who have already left as a result of the state’s poor policies,” Kiley said in a statement Wednesday. “Many of our state’s leading job creators are leaving preemptively.”

Kiley said it would be “fundamentally unfair” to retroactively impose taxes on former residents.

“California already has the highest income tax of any state in the country, the highest gas tax, the highest overall tax burden,” Kiley said in a House floor speech earlier this month. “But a wealth tax is something unique because a wealth tax is not merely the taxation of earned income, it is the confiscation of assets.”

The fate of Kiley’s proposal is just as uncertain as his future in Congress. His 5th Congressional District, which hugs the Nevada border, has been sliced up into six districts under California’s voter-approved Proposition 50, and he has not yet picked one to run in for re-election.

The Billionaire Tax Act, which backers are pushing to get on the November ballot, would charge California’s 200-plus billionaires a onetime 5% tax on their net worth in order to backfill billions of dollars in Republican-led cuts to federal healthcare funding for middle-class and low-income residents. It is being proposed by the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West.

In his floor speech, Kiley worried that the tax, if approved, could cause the state’s economy to collapse.

“What’s especially threatening about this is that our state’s tax structure is essentially a house of cards,” Kiley said. “You have a system that is incredibly volatile, where top 1% of earners account for 50% of the tax revenue.”

But supporters of the wealth tax argue the measure is one of the few ways that can help the state seek new revenue as it faces economic uncertainty.

Sanders, an independent from Vermont who caucuses with the Democrats, is urging Californians to back the measure, which he says would “provide the necessary funding to prevent more than 3 million working-class Californians from losing the healthcare they currently have — and would help prevent the closures of California hospitals and emergency rooms.”

“It should be common sense that the billionaires pay just slightly more so that entire communities can preserve access to life-saving medical care,” Sanders said in a statement earlier this month. “Our country needs access to hospitals and emergency rooms, not more tax breaks for billionaires.”

Other Democrats are not so sure.

Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is eyeing a presidential bid in 2028, has opposed the measure. He has warned a state-by-state approach to taxing the wealthy could stifle innovation and entrepreneurship.

Some of he wealthiest people in the world are also taking steps to defeat the measure.

Brin is donating $20 million to a California political drive to prevent the wealth tax from becoming law, according to a disclosure reviewed by the New York Times. Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and the chairman of Palantir, has also donated millions to a committee working to defeat the proposed measure, the New York Times reported.

When young adult author Courtney Summers got the rights back to her backlisted titles in 2024, she initially wasn’t sure what to do with them.

Summers’ novels, the bulk of which enjoyed peak popularity in the 2010s, had by then faded into the periphery — despite a film adaptation of her 2012 zombie thriller “This Is Not a Test,” which is slated to be released in theaters Feb. 20. But the Canadian author felt they still had potential.

That’s how she wound up pitching a “Taylor’s Version”-style rerelease of her backlist to a handful of desired publishers. Under this model, Summers would publish lightly revised versions of her old books — “make the background vocals stronger and the guitar richer,” so to speak — in the hopes of reanimating her work and reaching a new generation of readers.

Her unorthodox plan had one fledgling publisher’s name all over it — Bindery Books.

Co-founded by book marketing veteran Matt Kaye and former Becker&mayer! editor Meghan Harvey, Bindery Books is a publishing startup and membership platform that integrates influencer marketing into the book publication process. Unlike traditional publishing houses, Bindery operates via a handful of influencer-led imprints, designed to better serve reader interest and take the burden of book promotion off under-resourced authors.

“Bookish creators wanted to figure out how to build a career doing what they love. Authors want to reach an audience,” Kaye said. So he and Harvey decided to play matchmaker.

Bindery currently houses 12 imprints helmed by book influencers, or as Kaye called them, “tastemakers.” Oftentimes, these atypical acquiring editors grew their online book communities for several years before landing at Bindery.

Kathryn Budig, head of the speculative fiction imprint the Inky Phoenix, started her online book club of the same name in 2020. She published her first title with Bindery in 2024.

When Bindery’s acquisitions director Shira Schindel brought her Summers’ backlog last year, Budig first pulled “This Is Not a Test,” the most speculative of the bunch, and was immediately hooked.

“I read it, I went back to Shira and was like, ‘Give it to me. Mine. Mine,’” she said.

Since then, Budig has labored tirelessly to stoke enthusiasm for Summers’ book among her Inky Phoenix community members. Her genuine pride in Summers’ work, and eagerness for it to succeed, is tangible in every post and promotional video — just like Kaye and Harvey imagined.

The trust between Summers and Budig was immediate, the latter said: “We started a dev[elopmental] edit before we even inked the papers.”

It was a completely different publishing experience than Summers was used to, she said. Her previous publishers had been either too overworked or unbothered to treat her and her work with the respect she felt she deserved.

Under Budig’s wing, Summers said she was cared for and included in editorial decision-making, in part thanks to a project manager — a role typically not seen at legacy publishing houses. The author added that for the first time in the 14 years after its publication, “This Is Not a Test” is a Kids Indie Next pick.

For the Bindery team to make that happen, she said, “they pulled levers I can’t imagine would be possible in a more traditional model.”

Few of Bindery’s authors have Summers’ high profile or sizable backlog. Instead, nearly all of its titles are debuts, and about a third of its authors are unagented, Kaye said. Last year, several Bindery books hit bestseller and year-end lists.

Kaye attributed Bindery’s success to its nontraditional model, which by leveraging so-called “bookfluencer” reach integrates reader sentiment into the publication process rather than attempting to anticipate it — as many publishing houses still do.

“Part of what we’re trying to do is have that immediacy, like, you’re not many, many steps removed from the reader,” he said. “You’re actually in conversation with them every day.”

Nina Haines, the tastemaker behind Bindery’s Sapph-Lit imprint, said that she solicited member input on the imprint’s prospective debut titles before she’d even read the manuscripts. The synopsis that won by a landslide was Kim Narby’s “Saturn Returning,” expected in May.

Given traditional publishing has historically sidelined queer authors and refused them marketing budgets, Haines said she hopes to be “that person that gets it and fights for it.”

Jananie Velu, who heads Bindery’s Boundless Press imprint, has similarly aimed to enfranchise underrepresented authors — in her case, authors of color — whom she felt the publishers she formerly worked for never truly gave a chance.

“I spent years butting my head against the wall, like, ‘Why can’t I get more budget for this author?’” Velu said, adding that her past employers heavily devalued the influence of BookTok and “bookfluencing” on publishing.

“So the idea that I would get to choose the books and really be a champion for those books from day one, I felt was just really exciting,” she said.

Jane Friedman, a book industry veteran and author of “The Bottom Line” publishing industry newsletter, views the Bindery model as an effective “middle ground” between traditional book marketing and online influencing.

While the analyst said she was unsure of how scalable it is, she said the publisher’s tastemaker strategy “reads as very Gen Z and maybe an indicator of where the industry needs to go to stay fresh and relevant.”

Bindery is not yet profitable, Harvey said. But that’s on the horizon.

In the meantime, she said, the startup plans to grow — “slowly … so that every author’s needs are taken care of” — and keep pinpointing publishing “blind spots.”

“We as an industry tend to go for the surest bets,” Harvey said.

“But it’s very interesting to me to think about how you could find these really engaged communities around either underexposed or emerging genre interests, [where] readers are there but publishers aren’t.”

Actor Chris Pine was just 13 when his family’s finances took a turn and his parents lost their home.

So when the “Star Trek” actor read the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City” from author Matthew Desmond, about eight families who fight to stay housed in Milwaukee, he knew he had to make a film out of it.

“The power of what we do as filmmakers … is really to remind people that we are not alone, that our experiences are transcendent,” Pine recently told an audience at the Sundance Film Festival. “This is one of those stories.”

Pine is producing a documentary based on the book and it’s among several projects backed by Harbor Fund, an emerging Utah-based nonprofit investment group that leverages the donations of high-net-worth individuals and other investors to support films, television shows and documentaries that have a positive social message.

“Good stories can change how people feel,” Lindsay Hadley, Harbor Fund’s co-founder and chief executive, said in an interview. “We just really believe in the power of film and the entertainment world to harness a society of compassion.”

Since it began about a year and a half ago, the fund has raised $15 million from 82 donors with an average contribution of $250,000. Already, Hadley said, $10 million has been deployed across 22 projects, including “Evicted.”

“It’s rooted in housing policy and economics, but at its core, it’s about people — and stories like this aren’t always easy to back in an industry built to minimize risk,” Pine said in a statement.

“Harbor Fund immediately understood the moral center of the film and why it needed to be told honestly. Their mission goes beyond financing films. They care about what happens after a premiere — about bringing films into communities that initiate civic conversation and making sure the conversation continues beyond the screen.”

Finding a consensus on what constitutes a social good can be tricky, especially in the current fraught and deeply partisan political climate.

Hadley said she gets extensive advice on pitches from the fund’s advisory board, which includes filmmakers like Patty Jenkins, David Oyelowo, Amy Redford and Mark Burnett. The projects seek to home in on shared values and avoid works that dehumanize other people, she said.

Harbor Fund wants to reach $100 million in the next two years, said Hadley, who previously served as chief development officer for advocacy organization Global Citizen and has produced its annual festival in New York’s Central Park that supports social issues.

Efforts to finance socially conscious films aren’t new. Culver City-based production company Participant built its reputation around projects that prioritized social commentary, including Al Gore’s 2006 environmental documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” as well as Oscar-winning feature films such as 2015’s “Spotlight” and 2018’s “Green Book.” But the company closed in 2024 as the market for independent films changed drastically.

The traditional business model for indie films has broken down as audiences still have not shown up to theaters with the same enthusiasm as before the pandemic. Add to that a shrinking number of distributors — though some new ones recently emerged — and the inherent risk of funding a movie, and it’s no surprise investors have shied away.

“Theatrical windows used to be the lifeblood of independent film, and now it’s basically gone,” said David Offenberg, an associate professor of finance at Loyola Marymount University and author of the book “Independent Film Finance.”

Harbor Fund’s model for financing is rare, he said, though it taps into one of the big motivations for investors to fund movies and TV — social impact.

“A lot of investors are putting money into film because they want to make a change in the world and they want the movie to help make that change,” Offenberg said.

With a nonprofit venture capital-type structure, no costly production arm and a diversified portfolio, Harbor Fund aims to be sustainable, Hadley said. The fund also has invite-only forums, such as last year’s in Montana that featured actor Kevin Costner, where investors can hear about potential projects directly from those involved, which can include A-list stars.

Donors engage with the fund knowing they will not see a return on their investment. They choose projects they want to support, Harbor Fund takes an equity position in it, and any money it makes is invested back into the fund for future films and TV series.

“If it’s successful, it’s a gift that keeps giving,” Hadley said.

Investor Shauna Ockey of Calgary chose to contribute to the documentary “Orphan Myth,” which details the plight of children separated from family members in poverty, because she sees it as a social return rather than a financial one.

“Reuniting children with families so they don’t grow up in institutions is an important part of me and my husband’s value systems,” said Ockey, who has contributed $350,000 to Harbor Fund with her husband. “When you invest philanthropically in a film, of course you want to have the best outcome, but … not all films are going to be box office hits. But if it just impacts a few people, that’s a good enough return.”

The fund’s projects span a wide range of subjects, from “Hershey,” a film set for release this year about the philanthropic legacy of eponymous chocolate-maker Milton Hershey and his wife, Catherine, to “Flash Before the Bang,” a movie about a deaf track team.

The investments help pay the overhead costs for these films in part because of the belief that big-name stars will attract a larger audience and, hopefully, create more change, Hadley said.

For West Point, Utah-based investor Lloyd Roberts, the 2006 Will Smith drama “The Pursuit of Happyness,” about a father and son who struggle to find housing, changed his thinking about the role of perspective in feelings of fulfillment.

“You can have someone stand onstage and tell you these ideas, but you put it in a feature film like ‘The Pursuit of Happyness,’ and you feel like you have a firsthand view of how putting it into practice can help you,” said Roberts, who has invested a little more than $1 million in the fund and believes audiences will reap the benefits.

“One of the best mechanisms for an idea is not just documentaries but motion pictures that have an underlying message that pulls on their heartstrings,” he said.