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bernie sanders
‘Poor Jeff’: Sanders Ridicules Bezos-Owned Washington Post for Attacking Billionaire Tax Plan
"Surprise! The Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post is against my 5% billionaire wealth tax," said Sen. Bernie Sanders. "I wonder why?"
Mar 03, 2026
Sen. Bernie Sanders mocked Jeff Bezos on Tuesday after the editorial board of the newspaper owned by the Amazon founder denounced his plan to tax billionaires' wealth.
In an opinion piece published Monday, the Washington Post editorial board accused Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who co-sponsored Sanders' wealth tax plan, of threatening to "strangle America’s golden goose" by hitting billionaires with an annual 5% wealth tax.
"Sanders wants to confiscate 5% of all assets every year from America’s billionaires, with the goal of stealing half their fortunes," the editorial complained. "He estimates, unrealistically, that this could raise $4.4 trillion over 10 years to fund a wish list of progressive fantasies, including something akin to a universal basic income and more government-managed healthcare."
The editorial then argued this was bad because "even for billionaires, a 5% tax on every asset they own would virtually wipe out any gains they make in a normal year," and would force them to sell off some illiquid assets such as "collections of wines, art, jewelry, and yachts" just to make their annual payments to the government.
The editorial concluded by claiming "Sanders and Khanna take as a given the capacity of American capitalism to deliver continuing prosperity, no matter how many anchors they weigh it down with," then warned that "economic history proves that future growth is never guaranteed."
In a social media post, Sanders mocked the Post editors for publishing an opinion piece defending the economic interests of their owner, whose current net worth is estimated by Forbes to be well north of $200 billion.
"Surprise! The Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post is against my 5% billionaire wealth tax," Sanders wrote. "I wonder why? If enacted, Bezos would owe $12 billion in taxes, and an average family of four would receive a $12,000 direct payment. Poor Jeff would be left with just $224 billion to survive."
In a news article about the tax plan published by the Post Monday, Khanna was quoted as saying it was needed to address the historic disparities in wealth that have only grown over the last 50 years.
"This is Sen. Sanders' defining vision for our age," Khanna explained. "It is the most ambitious and transformative legislation for our times to tackle inequality in the New Gilded Age."
Wealth inequality has become so acute that the Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal in February published a news analysis declaring that billionaires' tax avoidance schemes were "becoming a problem for the economy."
The Journal last month also published an analysis of US wealth inequality by chief economics commentator Greg Ip showing that corporate profits’ share of gross domestic income is now the highest it has been in more than 40 years, while the share of income paid out in workers’ wages is at the lowest.
“Profits have soared since the pandemic, and the market value attached to those profits even more,” wrote Ip. “The result: Capital, which includes businesses, shareholders, and superstar employees, is triumphant, while the average worker ekes out marginal gains.”
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'Enough Is Enough': Sanders, Khanna Propose Billionaires Tax to Raise $4.4 Trillion
"In a democratic society, we cannot tolerate 60% of our people living paycheck to paycheck—struggling to pay for housing, food, and healthcare—while 938 billionaires have become $1.5 trillion richer."
Mar 02, 2026
The US economy has reached a breaking point, suggested Sen. Bernie Sanders on Monday as he and Rep. Ro Khanna introduced legislation to force billionaires pay their fair share in taxes.
"We can no longer tolerate a corrupt tax code that enables billionaires to pay a lower tax rate than the average worker," said Sanders (I-Vt.) "In a democratic society, we cannot tolerate 60% of our people living paycheck to paycheck—struggling to pay for housing, food, and healthcare—while 938 billionaires have become $1.5 trillion richer. We cannot continue a trend in which, over the past 50 years, $79 trillion in wealth in our country has been redistributed from the bottom 90% to the top 1%. Enough is enough. Billionaires cannot have it all."
The taxes of fewer than 1,000 people in the US would be impacted by the Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share Act, but just a 5% annual wealth tax on those households would be able to raise an estimated $4.4 trillion in revenue over the next decade, said Sanders' office—a fact that underscores the immense wealth of the 938 billionaires who would be targeted by the bill.
Those 938 people have a collective net worth of $8.2 trillion, and Sanders and Khanna (D-Calif.) pointed out how the immense fortunes of some high-profile billionaires would be affected by the bill.
According to the lawmakers, Tesla CEO and President Donald Trump ally Elon Musk, whose $833 billion net worth makes him richer than the bottom 53% of US households, would owe $42 billion in taxes—an unfathomable amount to the vast majority of Americans, but a comparatively tiny tax bill for Musk, who would be left with about $792 billion.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos would each owe just $11 billion compared to their $220 billion and $218 billion net worth.
The wealth of billionaires has risen rapidly in recent years, increasing by about 20% in 2025, according to Americans for Tax Fairness.
“We have a deep economic divide in this country. On one side, places like Silicon Valley are generating extreme wealth. On the other side, families are struggling to cover the cost of healthcare, housing, and basic needs," said Khanna. "We can tax billionaires a modest amount to make sure everyone has a fair chance while keeping our innovative engine. That is why I am proud to join Sen. Bernie Sanders to lead the Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share Act."
With the revenue collected from the wealth tax, said Sanders and Khanna, the federal government would:
- Provide a $3,000 direct payment to every man, woman, and child in a household making $150,000 or less;
- Reverse the $1.1 trillion in Medicaid and Affordable Care Act cuts in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which are estimated to cause more than 50,000 unnecessary deaths;
- Expand Medicare to cover dental, vision, and hearing care for millions of seniors;
- Build, rehabilitate, and preserve over 7 million affordable homes to eliminate the affordable housing gap and end homelessness;
- Ensure no family pays more than 7% of their income on childcare;
- Establish a $60,000 minimum annual salary for every public school teacher in America; and
- Expand Medicaid home health care for seniors and people with disabilities.
Khanna and Sanders emphasized that "no one who has a net worth of less than $1 billion would pay a penny more in taxes under this bill."
Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, economists at University of California, Berkeley, released an analysis Monday that found the bill "would raise approximately $4.4 trillion over a decade and close the gap between wealth growth for billionaires and income growth for the average American family that has existed since the early 1980s."
"Democracies become oligarchies when wealth becomes too concentrated," said the economists. "The US has now reached an unprecedented level of top wealth concentration. US billionaire wealth has exploded in recent years, more than doubling since 2019. A billionaire wealth tax is the most direct policy tool to curb the growing concentration of wealth among the billionaire class in the United States."
"Combining top wealth taxation with policies to rebuild middle class economic security," said Saez and Zucman, "is what the United States needs to ensure vibrant and equitable growth for the future."
As Jeff Stein wrote at the Washington Post, the proposal of a wealth tax—which is supported by roughly two-thirds of Americans, according to polls—could become a litmus test in the 2028 presidential election, in which Khanna has been named as a potential candidate.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom has also been named as a possible Democratic contender and has expressed vehement opposition to a billionaire tax that's been proposed in his state, putting him at odds with about 90% of Democratic voters there and three-quarters of all Californians.
Sanders—who supports the California measure—said that "it is time to enact a wealth tax on billionaires and use this revenue to address some of the major crises facing working families, the children, the elderly, the sick, and the most vulnerable.”
“At a time of unprecedented income and wealth inequality," he said, "this legislation demands that the billionaire class in America finally pay their fair share of taxes so that we can create an economy that works for all of us, not just the 1%."
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Honoring Michael Parenti, Who Kept the Torch of the US Left Lit and Sharply Afire
Parenti stands out as uniquely courageous and unapologetic in directly confronting capitalism, US imperialism, and the manifold corruptions and inequities of society’s powerful.
Feb 28, 2026
Michael Parenti, who died on January 24 at the age of 92, blazed a long, brave, and often lonely trail through American political thought and radical politics. The author of more than 25 books, including such many-editioned classics as Democracy for the Few and Inventing Reality, Parenti leaves behind a rich and vital legacy of intellectual and moral clarity.
Arguably one of the most influential thinkers and writers on the US left this past half-century, Parenti stands out as uniquely courageous and unapologetic in directly confronting capitalism, US imperialism, and the manifold corruptions and inequities of society’s powerful. Where many liberal writers bemoaned corporations and the rich, Parenti educated generations (including this writer) about capitalism’s fundamental contradictions and intrinsic forces of inequality, harm, and destruction.
Parenti grew up in a working-class family in East Harlem in New York City, and worked for a few years after high school before obtaining his BA from City College of New York. From there, he gained a teaching fellowship at Brown University, where he earned his MA, then earned his PhD at Yale University. Parenti taught at a slew of different colleges and universities across the United States, eventually becoming an itinerant lecturer and writer after he was widely blackballed from academia for his ideology and activism.
In 1970, Dr. Parenti’s career as a professor was derailed when he was clubbed by police while protesting the shootings of students at Kent State, leading to his ouster from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He soon resettled at the University of Vermont, which then booted him when he was convicted for the protest altercation. Parenti became part of the Green Mountain State’s upwelling of political ferment. He ran for Congress in 1974 on the Liberty Union ticket, netting third place with 7% of the vote, while his then-friend Bernie Sanders garnered 4% in his run for the US Senate.
At a time when the most radical US political rebellions are sadly emanating from the fascist, bigoted MAGA right, what we so urgently need is a fierce, disciplined, unapologetic, nonviolent uprising from the progressive left.
While growing up in this fertile milieu of 1970s Vermont, I met Parenti through our interconnected communities and chatted with him many times over the years. Alongside his brilliance and courage, Parenti was warm, amiable, engaging, and funny. He had a visceral humanity and compassion to him that embedded both his interactions and his writing.
“What the military-industrialists fail to see is that the pyramid of power and profit they build rests on a crumbling base,” he wrote in a 1981 essay in The Progressive, one of several pieces he contributed to this magazine between 1975-1992. “Ultimately, no political-economic order can remain secure by victimizing its own people. Sooner or later, this truth returns to haunt the mighty.”
One trademark Parenti talent was his ability to pierce through clotted, contorted mainstream narratives with sharp original insights. A favorite of mine comes from a speech he gave before a packed auditorium at the University of Colorado in 1986:
The Third World is not poor. You don’t go to poor countries to make money... Most countries are rich. The Philippines are rich. Brazil is rich. Mexico is rich. Chile is rich. Only the people are poor. There’s billions to be made there, to be carved out and to be taken. There’s been billions, for 400 years, the capitalist European and North American powers have carved out and taken the timber, the flax, the hemp, the cocoa, the rum, the tin, the copper, the iron, the rubber, the bauxite, the slaves, and the cheap labor... These countries are not underdeveloped, they are over-exploited.
The crowd erupted in thunderous applause, as often happened at a Parenti speech.
Many of Parenti’s works, while maligned or dismissed by mainstream critics, have proven to be startlingly prescient. Democracy for the Few, first published in 1974, provides a trenchant original analysis of the multi-layered relationships between economic and political power. A few short quotes from the book bear chillingly close resemblance to the intertwinement of money and politics today:
The close relationship between politics and economics is neither neutral nor coincidental. Large governments evolve through history in order to protect large accumulations of property and wealth.
It is ironic that people of modest means sometimes become conservative out of a scarcity fear bred by the very capitalist system they support.
In almost every enterprise, government has provided business with opportunities for private gain at public expense. Government nurtures private capital accumulation through a process of subsidies, supports, and deficit spending and an increasingly inequitable tax system.
In his 1986 book, Inventing Reality, Parenti delivers a searing and wise indictment of corporate mass media that goes beyond standard critiques. While liberal critics of corporate media may decry big business control of journalism, Parenti’s examination dug deeper into core fundamentals of capitalism: “As with any business, the mass media’s first obligation is to make money for their owners,” he wrote, and these wealthy owners “determine which person, which facts, which version of the facts, and which ideas shall reach the public.”
As a young, budding journalist when Inventing Reality was first published, I learned a great deal, not only about who owns and controls the media, but also about the many hidden biases embedded in US journalism stemming largely from that economic power. As Parenti often pointed out, mainstream media discourse typically spans a narrow political continuum from liberal to conservative, rarely including any radical or progressive perspectives, particularly ones like Parenti’s which confront capitalism directly.
Ironically, following Michael’s passing, the New York Times ran a lengthy obituary piece that illustrated many of these biases, highlighting mainstream criticisms of Parenti’s “uncompromising” stances and terming his speaking style as “feisty and animated.” Displaying some of the biases Parenti long critiqued, Times staffer Trip Gabriel wrote, “Parenti seemed to view every American domestic challenge as the fault of capitalism and every US foreign venture as an act of militarized imperialism.” As if such an assessment is somehow objectively inaccurate.
Parenti’s passing is especially notable and poignant due to the dearth of radical political thought and leadership in the United States today. While he was often outcast and blackballed throughout much of academia, he was of a now-gone generation on the left that, at least to some extent, retained its radicalism and Marxist analysis. In this respect, Parenti and his ideas came from the Old Left of the 1930s to the 1960s, rather than the New Left movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which often diverged from Marxism and communism.
In today’s chaotic and confusing political landscape, we have left-progressive figures of varying prominence and radicalism, but very few who, like Parenti, directly confront capitalism and its structural, systematic destruction, rather than simply chronicling the many anecdotes of its impacts.
Parenti’s legacies are many and important. Through his books and countless lectures, he inspired generations of progressive-left activists and thinkers. He kept the American left’s torch, so often flickering and adrift, lit and sharply afire.
But there’s another reason I think it’s time for many to discover or revisit Michael Parenti’s prolific oeuvre. At a time when the most radical US political rebellions are sadly emanating from the fascist, bigoted MAGA right, what we so urgently need is a fierce, disciplined, unapologetic, nonviolent uprising from the progressive left.
Parenti’s old one-time friend, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), called for political revolution when he ran for president in 2016 and 2020. We hear less of that call to action today, when so much of our political energy and time are consumed by our desperate defenses against President Donald Trump’s hideous autocracy.
Amid the daily chaos and maelstroms over Trump’s unrelenting assaults on immigrants, human, and civil rights, our environment, and this nation’s withering democracy, the “Overton window” of the politically possible has been squelched nearly shut. These days, even many progressives have been at least temporarily reduced to anti-Trumpers and, to some degree, to the dreary-grim “Blue no matter who” camp. We could really use the bold radicalism of Michael Parenti now, with his piercing ferocity and that iconic moral and intellectual clarity.
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