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tax the rich
'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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Billionaires Are 'Becoming a Problem for the Economy,' Declares Wall Street Journal Report
"Debate about how much tax billionaires pay is likely to grow as America’s fiscal situation deteriorates and its wealth gap widens."
Feb 18, 2026
A report published Wednesday by the Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal outlined how billionaires' tax evasion schemes are causing problems for the US economy.
The report, written by London-based columnist Carol Ryan, began by noting how completely the US economy has come to depend on the spending habits of its richest households, whose wealth is primarily tied to the fortunes of the stock market, which "could mean the entire economy pays a steep price in the next market correction."
Ryan then walked through some of the plusses and minuses of the wealth tax being debated in the state of California, which has more billionaires than any state in the nation.
Even while personally finding flaws with the California proposal, Ryan said that plans to extract wealth from the super-rich aren't going away, even if the California tax plan is ultimately defeated.
"Debate about how much tax billionaires pay is likely to grow as America’s fiscal situation deteriorates and its wealth gap widens," Ryan wrote. "Data from the Federal Reserve shows that only the richest 1% of households have grown their share of overall US wealth since 1990."
Ryan also broke down how the very richest Americans have tax evasion options that mere multimillionaires don't have.
"A common strategy is to avoid salaries, which are heavily taxed," she wrote. "Billionaires prefer to be paid in shares, which are subject to capital-gains taxes when sold. But they don’t need to sell to fund their lifestyles. Billionaires use borrowed money for living expenses, pledging their shares or other assets as collateral."
Ryan added that "the interest on the debt is much lower than a capital-gains tax bill would be," and billionaires compound this wealth by passing it off to their children as part of a “buy borrow die” tax avoidance plan.
Boston College law professor Ray Madoff told Ryan that the wealth at the very top has grown so concentrated that even "very well-off Americans with high incomes" are now aligned "much more with the middle class" than in the past.
Ryan's report isn't the only one published by the Journal in recent weeks to warn of dangerous levels of US wealth inequality.
Chief Wall Street Journal economics commentator Greg Ip last week posted data 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."
Ip also said that this problem could grow worse if artificial intelligence lives up to its creators' hype and starts replacing human workers on a mass scale.
In such a scenario, wrote Ip, the "biggest winners" of the economy would be shareholders who, as Ryan explained in her piece, have ample tools to avoid paying taxes.
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'It Should Be Common Sense': Sanders to Headline Billionaire Tax Campaign Kickoff in California
"Our country needs access to hospitals and emergency rooms, not more tax breaks for billionaires."
Feb 10, 2026
US Sen. Bernie Sanders is headed to Los Angeles next week to lead a campaign kickoff for a bill that would impose a one-time 5% tax on the assets of California's billionaires to support the state's healthcare system, including by keeping hospitals and emergency departments open.
Economists, healthcare workers, and unions launched the fight for the tax last year, after Republicans in Congress and President Donald Trump enacted a budget package that included massive Medicaid cuts. Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW) is spearheading the battle for the California Billionaire Tax Act.
Sanders (I-Vt.) endorsed the proposal in December, calling it "a model that should be emulated throughout the country." He is now set to appear at the Wiltern in Los Angeles alongside musical acts and other supporters of the ballot measure for the bill on Wednesday, February 18.
"At a time of unprecedented and growing wealth consolidation and income inequality, I strongly support the grassroots effort in California to impose this reasonable and necessary 5% wealth tax on about 200 California billionaires," Sanders said in a Tuesday statement.
"This initiative would provide the necessary funding to prevent over 3 million working-class Californians from losing the healthcare they currently have—and would help prevent the closures of California hospitals and emergency rooms," noted the senator, a longtime leading advocate of higher taxes for the ultrarich and Medicare for All.
"It should be common sense that the billionaires pay just slightly more so that entire communities can preserve access to lifesaving medical care," he added. "Our country needs access to hospitals and emergency rooms, not more tax breaks for billionaires."
Mayra Castaneda, an ultrasound technologist at St. Francis Medical Center in Lynwood, said that "we are very grateful for the support of US Sen. Sanders, who for years has been telling the truth about the threat that income inequality poses to our nation—and to working people."
"If we let these healthcare cuts stand, my patients will suffer," Castaneda stressed. "Hospitals and ERs will close, others will be strained by taking on more patients, and people will lose access to lifesaving care."
"This is all avoidable if billionaires just pay their fair share in California, so I'm going to do whatever is in my power to see this proposal pass in November," Castaneda continued. "I'll be telling my story alongside Sen. Sanders and urging my fellow Californians to take action to save lives."
Healthcare experts warn a crisis is here. Congress’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” cuts $100B from CA healthcare. LA Times: “People will die.” A one-time 5% billionaire tax can backfill the cuts and protect care.https://lat.ms/4amFfYK
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— SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West (@seiu-uhw.bsky.social) February 4, 2026 at 7:00 PM
According to the Los Angeles Times, which first reported on the upcoming event: "The supporters need to gather the signatures of nearly 875,000 registered voters and submit them to county elections officials by June 24 for the measure to qualify for the November ballot. They began gathering signatures in January."
While the bill targeting the state's billionaires is backed by Sanders—who caucuses with Democrats in Congress and twice sought the party's presidential nomination—its opponents include Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is expected to run for president in 2028.
"Gavin Newsom is on the side of the billionaires, not the millions of working people who stand to lose healthcare because of the Trump cuts," progressive organizer Jonathan Rosenblum said after the governor made his position clear last month. "Shamefully typical of the Democratic establishment."
The Times noted Tuesday that other opponents include "San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, who is among a dozen candidates running in November to replace the termed-out governor."
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