There’s money to be made in California this spring, no start-up pitch or buzzy screenplay required. Instead, signatures are one of the state’s most coveted commodities: Campaigns are paying $15 apiece to those willing to collect them.

Petition distributors can thank Sergey Brin for this pay bump. In an effort to kill California’s proposed billionaire tax, the Google cofounder and other local tycoons are funding a political group that has hiked the going rate for signatures collected in support of countermeasures. In all, foes of the wealth tax are expected to spend $75 million in their attempt to quash the proposal. Brin himself has donated $45 million to the cause—a sum that suggests he just might be able to afford a higher tax bill.

Billionaires offering bounties for signatures is just the latest indignity in a political system long defined by the machinations of the wealthy. With more than $125 million poured into advertising, Texas’s recent Senate election was the most expensive primary race ever. In 2024, billionaires contributed 19 percent of all reported donations to federal elections, while AIPAC and an associated super PAC spent nearly $100 million. That’s also how much one AI industry group plans to shell out during this year’s midterms. The political funding arms race is deepening. And all that most Americans can afford to bring to the fight is one vote.

The crisis has escalated since 2010, when the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision shredded limits on independent corporate election spending, fueling the cash-flush super PACs and anonymous dark-money nonprofits that now dominate our political economy. Cycle after cycle, the proportion of that money that is untraceable has only increased. In 2024, $1.5 billion in super PAC donations came from organizations that aren’t required to name their donors.

Though plenty of individual Democrats and Republicans have been buoyed by this deluge of dollars, the ruling has, on balance, boosted conservatives. In states where Citizens United struck down existing bans on corporate donations, Republicans received a four-point electoral bump, even though voters themselves didn’t move to the right.

Rampant income inequality has also fueled a parallel democratic deficit. The richest 10 percent of Americans now own 93 percent of the stock market, and the number of billionaires in the US has increased by 50 percent in the last eight years. This means a larger pool of individuals with essentially unlimited political spending power. Only 23 Americans donated $1 million or more in the 2004 election. Twenty years later, 408 people did the same.

Even now, the Supreme Court is considering dismantling one of the final restrictions on big money in politics, a law that caps the amount party organizations can spend in coordination with campaigns. But to do so would be to exacerbate a status quo that is already extraordinarily unpopular: more than three-quarters of Americans disagree with the Citizens United ruling, and approximately 80 percent say that Congress is unduly influenced by donors.