Gavin Newsom made between $1.7 million and $2 million a year for three straight years, paid about half a million of that to federal and state tax collectors, sold a Marin County house in 2021 for nearly $6 million and walked away with roughly $800,000 of the gain, and is now considering a 2028 presidential run on a record that includes, just this June, being publicly identified as a target of a Justice Department investigation he says President Trump personally directed at him and his wife. The numbers came out of his own office, in more than 700 pages of tax filings, in the last week of July. The story is not that a sitting governor is rich. The story is what his wealth, and the political machinery around it, tells the country about whose household budget the Democratic Party is currently built to defend — and whose it is built to ask for one more year of patience.
I want to be careful about something before I keep going. My husband David and I are a two-income household in a 1,400-square-foot rowhouse in Fishtown with a 7%-interest mortgage, a 4-year-old and a 1-year-old in daycare that runs $2,400 a month, and a net of $8,800 a month after taxes to make all of that work. We are doing fine. We are not the people this column is about. I am writing about a man whose household income in 2021 — $4.2 million, with a $1 million tax bill — was a little under half of what my household will earn in the next four decades combined, and who is nonetheless considered a plausible tribune of working-class Democrats. The recognition I am writing from is the recognition that the family math the people above me on the ticket are running and the family math I am running are not the same family math, and that this is the part of the deal that is not the same deal.
The median California household earns about $96,000 a year by the latest Census ACS estimates — roughly a twentieth of what the governor’s family made in 2021, and about a twentieth of the low end of his annual income. The governor of the fifth-largest economy in the world makes roughly twenty times what the median family in his state earns. This is not necessarily a scandal — Newsom had a successful business career before politics, and his income is largely from outside investments, not his governor’s salary. It is a data point. The question is what the comparison is supposed to do for you. It is supposed to make you think: well, at least he’s transparent. It is not supposed to make you think: what does half a million in taxes look like to a family making ninety-six thousand — because the answer is nothing; that figure does not appear on that family’s spreadsheet. There is no line for it. There is just rent, and daycare, and the school fundraiser, and the car payment, and the student loan that keeps extending its horizon by eighteen months every time the political class finishes litigating the forgiveness plan. A family earning $96,000 in Los Angeles is cost-burdened by definition: the median rent in LA County is pushing $2,500 a month by Zillow and Zumper data, which alone eats a third of gross income before you add utilities, gas, food, insurance, and the childcare line that makes everything else look small.
I do not begrudge Newsom the money. I begrudge the silence about what the money means. A governor earning between $1.7 million and $2 million a year for three years running — and the documents are his own release, the numbers are his own filing — sits down to a budget conversation about the state of California in which his personal financial pressure is not in the room. The $11,582 a year the average American family pays for child care, the 41% of middle-income renters who are cost-burdened, the 22.4 million renter households paying more than they can afford for the place they sleep — none of those numbers touch the Newsom household ledger. The governor’s wine-country restaurant investment, the PlumpJack wine and hospitality portfolio his finances still tie him to, the Marin County property that appreciated into the $6 million sale — that is the asset class the household policy of a Newsom-led Democratic Party is designed by, staffed by, and ultimately accountable to. The household policy of a Democratic Party that I am inside is a different problem, and it is the one I want to name.
This is the part of the generational-betrayal story that doesn’t get told cleanly, because telling it cleanly would require a vocabulary the political-media class has decided not to have. The standard frame is that Republicans are the party of the rich and Democrats are the party of the working class, and the frame survives only because nobody running the frame has to do the kitchen-table math on either side. The Newsom numbers are the receipt. A governor of the most populous state in the country, the standard-bearer for a Democratic resistance to Trumpism that millions of people under 40 are counting on, made more in three years than my parents — a USPS supervisor and a Catholic-school nurse — will earn in a decade of combined Social Security. The policy preferences of a household that earns that are not the policy preferences of a household that does not, and pretending otherwise is a form of lying that we have agreed, in a kind of unspoken compact, to keep calling politics.
I want to read those numbers next to the budget Newsom unveiled in May, the $350 billion revised budget without a deficit that included a new software tax and the kind of fiscal discipline that gets praised in editorials and passed by a Democratic supermajority. A budget that adds a software tax — a consumption tax, in the most regressive possible sense, on the small businesses and freelancers and middle-class households that can least absorb it — while the governor’s own household is realizing $800,000 of capital gains on a single home sale is a budget that has decided, structurally, whose surplus to protect and whose shortfall to fund. The Newsom household is a wealth-holding household; the working California household is a wage-earning household; the two are not the same fiscal citizen, and a budget that does not see that difference has decided to be blind to it. The decision is not the budget’s mechanism. The decision is the budget’s mechanism’s cui bono.
The 2021 house sale is the part of the story that does the most work, and it is the line I keep coming back to. Newsom and his wife sold a Marin County home for almost $6 million and made $800,000 on the sale. The sale itself is not a real estate transaction; it is a generational-wealth event masquerading as a move. An $800,000 gain on a house the family lived in means they bought at the right time in the right zip code and the California housing market did the rest. The same market that produced that gain has produced a state where more than half of renters are cost-burdened by HUD’s standard definition and the homeownership rate for households under thirty-five has dropped to 37 percent, well below the national average. The governor’s tax returns are not evidence that the system works. They are evidence that someone got to be in the room when the music was playing, and the music stopped for most people a long time ago. That year their total income hit $4.2 million and they paid more than $1 million in federal and state taxes — a tax bill larger than most California households will earn in a decade. Gavin Newsom and his wife realized that gain in a year when the rest of the country was still inside the pandemic, when the Federal Reserve was still buying mortgage-backed securities at $40 billion a month to keep the housing market from seizing, when the renters I know were using the expanded Child Tax Credit to make December rent and the homeowners I know were refinancing at 2.8%. That is the asset class. That is the household the policy of the resistance is being designed by. The PlumpJack hospitality portfolio, the wine-country restaurant business, the Marin County property — these are the things the policy of the resistance is built to defend, and the people the policy of the resistance is being asked to pay for are the people who do not own any of them. The asks for patience, the asks for one more election cycle, the asks for one more federal investigation to ride out — those asks are the asks of a household that has $4.2 million of income in a single year making the ask to a household that has $105,600 of income in the same year, and the asking is the asking because the askers have not yet had to do the asked-of math themselves. I have done the math. I do the math every month. The recognition I am writing from is the recognition that the math is the math, and the math has a name.
I want to read the numbers next to the other thing Newsom is doing right now, which is publicly fighting a Justice Department investigation he says Trump personally directed at him and his wife, the same week his office is releasing the tax filings that prove he and his wife can afford the most expensive defense lawyers in the country. The juxtaposition is not a coincidence and the political economy of it is the column. A household with $1.7 million to $2 million a year of income and an $800,000 capital-gain windfall can absorb the legal fees, the reputational consultants, the political-adviser retainers, and the opportunity cost of a multi-year federal investigation without the math changing. A household with $8,800 a month after taxes and two kids in daycare cannot. The Democratic Party’s current answer to Trumpism requires the second household to keep showing up to defend the first household’s right to keep running the party, and the second household, which is mine, is being asked to do that on fumes. I have been asked to do that on fumes. The recognition I am writing from is the recognition that the ask is the ask, and that the people making the ask are not, materially, in the same kind of trouble I am in.
This is the mirrorball thing — Swift’s song about the work of being what people need you to be, catching the light from every angle, performing transparency so no one asks what is underneath. Newsom’s office released more than seven hundred pages of tax filings. Seven hundred pages. That is not disclosure; that is theater. A real transparency move would be releasing the briefing book his administration used to decide that California’s child-care subsidy programs would continue to leave most eligible families unserved, or the internal analysis of how many families the state’s housing production goals actually reach. That paperwork would be harder to read and it would not make anyone feel good about the person who released it. It might even generate a headline about the gap between what the governor earns and what the families he governs can afford. The returns for 2025 are not yet available — the couple filed for an extension and will complete them in October. By then the presidential primary will be closer, the federal investigation will have produced more news cycles, and the tax release will be part of a larger body of evidence the governor will present to the country as proof of his transparency. It is good evidence of something. It just is not evidence of a functioning California economy for the people who do not make $1.7 million a year and do not have a Marin County house to sell when they need a cash infusion.
I keep thinking about a specific line from the lyrics I have been reading all summer, the one that goes “everybody’s gotta be / a millionaire by the time they’re twenty-seven / to keep up with the Joneses / and the Joneses are a family I’m not even a part of.” That is not a Taylor Swift line. That is from SZA, from the album my sister played in the car the whole drive to Wildwood last August, and it is the line I think of when I read a story like this. The Joneses are a family the Newsoms are a part of. I am not a part of that family. The policy preferences of a household that is part of that family are not the policy preferences of a household that is not part of that family. This is not a complex insight. This is the kitchen-table math.
I want to be honest about what I am not saying. I am not saying Newsom is corrupt. I am not saying his tax returns are not his returns. I am not saying he does not have a right to the income he has earned. I am not saying that the absence of a deficit in a $350 billion state budget is a bad outcome. I am saying that the family math he is running and the family math I am running are not the same family math, and that the Democratic Party’s current standard-bearer being a household of the first kind is a fact about the Democratic Party that the Democratic Party does not want to have a fact about itself. I am also saying, with my own household ledger visible: I am inside the party. I am not leaving the party. I am asking the party to look at the math.
I am not the first person to make this argument. Anne Helen Petersen, in Can’t Even, made the structural argument about the working conditions that produced the millennial-burnout cohort I am part of. Jia Tolentino, in Trick Mirror, made the argument that the wellness-and-optimization regime is a market substitution for the policy the working-class household actually needs. Annie Lowrey, in Give People Money, made the argument that U.S. poverty is a policy choice and not an inevitability. Heather McGhee made the argument, in The Sum of Us, that the public goods the working class needed were drained rather than shared. Pamela Druckerman, in Bringing Up Bébé, made the argument that the U.S. parental-leave and child-care regime is the structural-policy choice that makes the household-budget math I am running every month impossible to balance without a 7%-interest mortgage and a $2,400-a-month daycare bill. Every one of those arguments is the argument I am making here, and every one of them predates the Newsom tax-return story. The reason I am making the argument with this story, today, in this column, is that this story is the one where the askers are named, and the asking is the asking, and the math is the math. I am not the first. I am one more. The argument is older than I am, and the argument is going to be here after I am done writing it.
I sat at my kitchen table at 11 PM in March 2022 with a column-form spreadsheet open in Google Sheets, and I ran the math four ways. No matter how I ran it, the math did not add up to the standard of living my parents had afforded on my father’s USPS supervisor income. That was the recognition column I was in then, the recognition that the trap was structural rather than personal. What I am writing here is the recognition that the political economy of the resistance to Trumpism is also a recognition. The household the resistance is being asked to defend is a household the resistance’s policy is built by. The household the resistance is being asked to defend is the household. The kitchen-table math I am doing is being asked of me by a household whose kitchen-table math I will never be running, and the asking is the asking, and the math has a name.
The closing image I want to leave you with is not the Newsom tax return. The closing image is the kitchen table I am sitting at, at 11 PM, with a column-form spreadsheet open in Google Sheets and a cold tea and a sleeping four-year-old and a sleeping one-year-old and a husband who has already gone to bed because one of us needs to sleep and it is not going to be me tonight. The kitchen table is the same one my mother sat at in Lansdale in 1987, when my father was on the night shift and my brother Jake was asleep and I was asleep and my sister Kate had not yet been born and the household math was the household math on a single USPS supervisor income with three kids in Catholic school and a mortgage on a three-bedroom in St. Stanislaus parish. That math worked. The same math does not work for me. The reason the same math does not work for me is not because I am worse at math. The reason is that the math changed. The math changed because the household-policy regime the Newsom Democratic Party currently represents is the household-policy regime the Newsom household’s wealth is built by, and the household-policy regime my household needs is a different household-policy regime, and the difference is the difference between a Democratic Party that defends a household with $1.7 million to $2 million a year of income and a Democratic Party that defends a household with $8,800 a month after taxes. I am inside the Democratic Party. I am asking the Democratic Party to look at the math. The math has a name. The name of the math is $1.7 million to $2 million. The name of the math is $4.2 million. The name of the math is $800,000 of capital gain on a single home sale in Marin County in 2021. The name of the math is the ask. I am making the ask. Look at the math.