Moneyed

The nitty-gritty details of specific policies can get complicated, and many voters don't take the time to get educated on them. That can give well-funded advertising campaigns more power to shape their views.
Why did California's billionaire tax fail to surf the blue wave?

Then, once again, it seems to me that the problem with money in politics is twofold: One) people are being passive receptacles for information on topics, rather than doing some basic due diligence themselves and two) no more is expected of them. When campaign finance activists seek to limit spending on campaigns, they have an incentive to portray the voting public as helpless to become even marginally engaged on issues.

I, personally, am not a big fan of "wealth taxes," especially as means of plugging holes in state budgets; I'd rather have an across-the-board income tax (flat or progressive, take your pick), because I feel that using taxation specifically as a means of wealth transfer has a few to many perverse incentives attached to it. It's similar to the discussion around Medicare for All. People point to Europe as a model for the payment saide, but they still expect American levels of access to, and quality of, care, when that's really not the way Europe appears to operate. For many left-leaning people in the United States, "billionaires" are conceived of as an endless pot of money that can be used to make other people's lives better without their being any costs associated with it. Reality is rarely that simple. But I digress.

If the presumption is that some significant portion of people are simply going to vote in accordance with whomever has been able to funnel the most messaging their way, then direct democracy, in the form of citizen initiatives and referenda, is a bad idea. I've come to the conclusion that attempting to make the world safe for passivity and ignorance leads to bad outcomes. Especially given that, in a representative (or direct) government, people can vote in favor of things that they want without needing to care about whether or not those things are attainable, or what the costs are. And the United States already appears to have a problem with people voting for their short-term interests and presuming that a long-term bill will never come due.