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tax the rich
House Progressives Unveil 'Defund the Oligarchs, Fund the People' Resolution
"Trump promised to lower costs for families on day one, but a year since he took office, grocery, housing, and healthcare costs are out of control," said Rep. Rashida Tlaib. "It's time to tax the rich."
Jan 30, 2026
As President Donald Trump continues to serve billionaires over working people and degrade the US economy, a trio of progressive congresswomen on Friday introduced the Defund the Oligarchs, Fund the People Resolution.
"Trump promised to lower costs for families on day one, but a year since he took office, grocery, housing, and healthcare costs are out of control," said Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), who is leading the measure with Congresswomen Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.). Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.) is an original co-sponsor.
Tlaib took aim at Trump and Republicans who control both chambers of Congress for forcing through their so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year: "He signed into law the largest cuts to healthcare and food assistance in the history of our country, all to give trillions of dollars in tax breaks to his rich donors and their massive corporations."
"Meanwhile, 60% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, and CEOs are making 281 times more than their average worker," she stressed. "It's time to tax the rich, defund the oligarchy, and invest those funds in the needs of working families."
"Every dollar that gets plundered by billionaires through tax breaks, corporate giveaways, and political favoritism is a dollar that is taken away from healthcare, housing, education, and good jobs."
The resolution declares that "the United States was created to be a democracy, founded on the principle that all people are created equal, governed not by kings or corporate masters but by themselves as free citizens," and "the gravest threat to democracy and individual freedoms is the alliance of private wealth and authoritarian government."
At various moments over the past 250 years, Americans have "sounded the alarm" over oligarchy and the federal government "has vigorously combated excessive concentrations of power and wealth," the measure notes. However, in recent decades, the government "has forfeited its role safeguarding democracy."
The resolution highlights that the combined wealth of the country's 900 billionaires exceeds that of the 67,000,000 households in the poorest 50%, as working people contend with stagnant wages and struggle to afford everything from healthcare to housing. Trump notably said during a Thursday Cabinet meeting that "I don't want to drive housing prices down, I want to drive housing prices up for people that own their homes. And they can be assured that's what's going to happen."
While many measures introduced by progressives don't even receive votes in the GOP-controlled Congress, this one is especially unlikely to go anywhere, given that it explicitly calls out not only the superrich donors who use their money to control the US political system but also the president, whom many lawmakers in his party are afraid to criticize.
Blasting "the quid pro quo" between Trump and the ultrawealthy oligarchs and corporations, the resolution emphasizes that they "are corrupting United States politics through billions in open and hidden campaign contributions and by exploiting their monopoly control in key sectors of the economy, and especially over media, information, and emerging digital technologies."
"Trump has permitted pay-to-play schemes to become endemic, as oligarchs leverage political contributions to win hundreds of billions in taxpayer-funded federal subsidies, tax breaks, regulatory rollbacks, and government contracts despite exploiting workers and polluting communities," it continues, specifically pointing to spending by the fossil fuel, tech, and cryptocurrency industries.
"Public funds belong to the people of the United States and should be invested in education, healthcare, housing, clean energy, and infrastructure, not used to enrich the wealthiest individuals and most powerful corporations," the resolution argues. It also expresses concern about a decline in union membership that "has diminished the ability of the labor movement" to continue its "significant historical role in counteracting corporate power, reducing inequality, and ensuring the political system is responsive to the interests of ordinary Americans, not just wealthy elites."
The resolution includes various demands for the president and Congress. It says that Trump "must not reward oligarchs and billionaire-controlled corporations with lucrative, publicly funded contracts, loans, and grants" when they engage in corrupt scheming, fail to fairly compete in open markets, and break federal laws.
It also says that the president and Congress must:
- Act with all deliberate speed to protect election integrity;
- Break up all concentrations of economic and political power;
- Drastically reduce levels of economic inequality and concentrations of inherited wealth;
- Reform the Supreme Court;
- Support the dramatic expansion of unions;
- Explore ways to promote alternative, noncorporate forms of ownership; and
- Use public money to fund programs that raise the standard of living.
"While working families have to choose between paying rent, buying groceries, or keeping the heat on, billionaires are just getting richer," said Jayapal. "We must rein in corporate power by breaking up monopolies and reforming campaign finance laws."
"It's time to make billionaires pay their fair share of taxes and reinvest those funds to provide for our communities—housing, healthcare, and education," she continued. "Our resolution calls for a political and economic system that benefits working families, not one that enriches the ultrawealthy."
The resolution comes just months before the midterm elections and amid pressure on Democrats to prove they can offer a true alternative to Trump's government full of loyalists, weak labor market, persistently high inflation, and tax giveaways to the rich—including Elon Musk, a former presidential adviser and the richest person on the planet.
Some of that pressure has come from the grassroots group Our Revolution, which is backing the resolution alongside organizations including Americans for Tax Fairness, Climate and Community Institute, MoveOn, National Nurses United, Patriotic Millionaires, People's Action, Public Citizen, RootsAction, and Social Security Works.
"Every dollar that gets plundered by billionaires through tax breaks, corporate giveaways, and political favoritism is a dollar that is taken away from healthcare, housing, education, and good jobs. That is not just corruption, it is a betrayal of who government is supposed to serve, and it is why so many people feel that democracy is not working for them," said Our Revolution executive director Joseph Geevarghese.
"The truth is, none of the policies working families are fighting for can ever fully materialize as long as corporate money and billionaire influence are writing the rules," he added. "Lawmakers cannot keep pretending to serve both the corporate class and working families at the same time. If we want real progress on wages, healthcare, housing, and climate, cutting off corporate corruption and reinvesting in our communities has to be part of how we govern, not just something we talk about during elections."
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Pedal to the Metal on California's Billionaire Tax
I have no problem with hitting billionaires with a much higher tax bill than they now face. The deeper issue is how to prevent the creation of billionaires in the first place.
Jan 28, 2026
A coalition of unions and other progressive groups is trying to get an initiative on California’s ballot this fall which would impose a 5 percent tax on the wealth of the 200-250 billionaires living in the state. The tax would be retroactive, so it applies to billionaires who lived in the state as of January 1 of this year. The supporters estimate that it could raise $100 billion, almost 30 percent of the state’s annual budget, although the tax could be paid over five years.
Many people have asked me what I thought about the tax. I confess to originally being hesitant. I have no problem with hitting billionaires with a much higher tax bill than they now face. After all, they are the ones with the money.
The right likes to push the story that billionaires won’t have incentive to become ridiculously rich if we tax them more. I always found that absurd, but even taken seriously what would it mean? Will Elon Musk spend less money and effort bribing politicians to get government contracts and favorable regulatory treatment if we tax him too much?
But that aside, I do take seriously concerns about evasion and avoidance. Billionaires care a lot about their money, and they are prepared to go to great lengths to avoid having to surrender it to the government. There clearly is some point at which we get less tax revenue by raising rates, as a result of evasion and avoidance. And that point is lower at the state and local level than the national level, since it’s much easier for billionaires to move out of New York City or California than to leave the United States.
On this point, I was influenced by research by Joshua Rauh and Ryan Shyu showing that the state lost 60 percent of the revenue anticipated by California’s 2012 Proposition 30. This raised the marginal tax rate on people earning more than $1 million a year from 10.3 percent to 13.3 percent. This suggested to me that California was very close to this tipping point. (It got closer when Trump’s 2017 tax bill limited the deduction for state and local taxes on the federal taxes.)
Rauh works at the conservative Hoover Institute, so I naturally viewed the work with suspicion, but I could not see anything wrong with it. (If anyone can tell me where they messed up, I’m all ears.)
Anyhow, recognizing that avoidance and evasion are real, I have always been cautious about efforts to whack the rich with very large taxes. I am open to the California wealth tax because its structure seems to minimize this risk.
By making the date at which the wealth tax applies in the past, rich people cannot leave going forward. I was concerned about some billionaires fleeing when the tax was being discussed in the fall, and it seems some did, but at this point that’s water under the bridge.
To be clear, I’m absolutely certain that many of the people facing the tax will do everything they can to try to escape the tax, starting with defeating the initiative, and then tying it up in the courts as long as they can. With the ultimate decision likely to rest with the Republican Supreme Court, I’m not at all confident that the state will see the money, but we can’t preemptively surrender. At this point it seems worth going full speed ahead with the initiative.
The Longer Term: Let’s Not Have Billionaires
My bigger complaint with the effort to tax back some of the billionaires’ billions is that we should be more focused on not letting them be billionaires in the first place. There is an incredibly lazy view that we just have a market sitting there, which generates inequality, and then we need the government to step in to redistribute income.
More than a decade ago, Elizabeth Warren, who I greatly admire, did a viral video that was dubbed “you didn’t build that.” The gist of it was that the success of rich people depended on a social and physical infrastructure that was paid for by the whole of society, not just the hard work and ingenuity of the person who happened to get rich.
This is very true. To be profitable, a factory needs the roads and ports to bring their materials in and ship their finished product out. It also needs a skilled workforce to be both on the factory flaw and to handle business operations. No one can get rich by themselves.
Elizabeth Warren Doesn’t Go Far Enough
But this is only part of the story. In addition to the physical and social infrastructure, we have a massive set of rules that determine who gets to keep the goodies. I keep harping on government-granted patent and copyright monopolies, both because there is a huge amount of money at stake (easily over $1 trillion a year or $8k per household) and because they so obviously could be different.
We can make these monopolies shorter and weaker, allowing their holders to profit much less from them. Also, we can rely more on alternative mechanisms, like direct public funding of research, as we do currently with more than $50 billion a year in biomedical research at the National Institutes of Health. Many of today’s yacht-loving billionaires would still be working for a living with different rules on intellectual property.
Labor law is another obvious case where governments set the rules, and they could be structured in a way far more beneficial to workers. In the early post-World War II era it was widely recognized that large corporations with monopolistic power dominated the economy, but that was not necessarily seen as a bad thing, because their workers also benefited from higher wages. This was due to the fact that they were unionized and able to demand their share of the benefits from monopolistic power.
This is much less the case today because unions are far weaker. But that is not a natural outcome, the rules on labor-management relations were written to make workers weaker. There is no natural market in this story, the government writes the rules to make them more beneficial to one side or the other.
Just to give a few examples: the prohibition on secondary boycotts in the US is a regulation that unambiguously weakens unions. A secondary boycott would mean Elon Musk’s suppliers could be struck over sending him steel, if he didn’t give the auto workers at Tesla a big pay hike.
The ban on union shops (“right-to-work”) in most states, where all the workers who benefit from a union pay their share of the union’s costs, is a government intervention against freedom of contract. This also weakens workers. Restrictions or outright bans on collective bargaining by gig workers is another example. In addition, there could be serious penalties for violating labor laws, as in millions of dollars in fines from real courts, rather than joke sanctions from the National Labor Relations Board.
None of this is “the market.” This is a story of government policy designed to give more money to the oligarchs.
The list goes on. Mark Zuckerberg, and now Larry Ellison, would be much poorer without Section 230, which protects their massive social media platforms from the same sort of liability for spreading lies that print and broadcast media face. Different bankruptcy laws that made private equity firms liable for the debts of the companies they take over and then push into bankruptcy would likely have prevented many of today’s billionaires, as would applying a sales tax on financial transactions similar to the sales tax people pay when they buy clothes or shoes.
This is the topic of my now dated book Rigged (it’s free). The point is that the market is infinitely malleable. We can structure it in a way that leads to far more equality or in ways that gives all the money to billionaires, as we have done in the last half century.
In that context, by all means we should try to find creative ways to tax back some of the wealth we have allowed them to accumulate, but it makes much sense, and it’s much more efficient, not to structure the market in a way that gives them all the money in the first place.
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The Rich in the US Are Getting Even Richer—and That's Bad News for Our Democracy
These ultra-wealthy individuals have outsized influence on our democratic system—and have actively worked to undermine it.
Jan 23, 2026
The top 15 wealthiest people in America are part of a very, very exclusive club: those with over $100,000,000,000 in net worth. After double checking those zeroes, we can confidently say that yes, there are 15 centi-billionaires living among us.
And, according to a new Institute for Policy Studies analysis of data from the Forbes real time billionaire list, the combined wealth of that 12-figure club grew from $2.4 trillion to $3.1 trillion over the course of 2025.
For context, that 30.3% rate of growth outpaced both the S&P 500 (16%) and billionaires in general (20.8%) over the last year. To put it succinctly, the wealthiest Americans are accumulating capital faster than everyone else.
The top 15 wealthiest billionaires aren’t the only ones doing well for themselves. Our analysis found that the number of US billionaires increased from 813 with combined wealth of $6.7 trillion at the end of 2024 to 935 US billionaires with combined assets of $8.1 trillion.
The top five wealthiest billionaires all saw huge wealth jumps in 2025.
- Elon Musk of Tesla-X and SpaceX with $726 billion, up from $421 billion a year ago.
- Larry Page of Google, with $257 billion, up from $156 billion a year ago.
- Larry Ellison of Oracle fame with $245 billion, up from $209 billion a year ago.
- Jeff Bezos of Amazon with $242 billion, up from $233.5 billion a year ago.
- Sergey Brin of Google with $237 billion, up from $148.9 billion a year ago.
The three wealthiest dynastic families in the US hold an estimated $757 billion, up from $657.8 billion at the end of 2024, a 16% gain. These are:
- Walton: Seven members of the Walton Family with combined wealth of $483 billion, up from $404.3 billion a year ago.
- Mars: Six members of Mars family with combined wealth of $120 billion, down from $130.4 billion a year ago.
- Koch: Two members of the Koch family have a combined wealth of $154.8 billion, up from $121.1 billion a year ago.
As we predicted it would at the time, the Covid-19 pandemic drastically accelerated wealth concentration.
On March 18, 2020, for example, Elon Musk had wealth valued just under $25 billion. A little over five years at the end of 2025, Musk’s wealth is $726 billion, a dizzying 2,800% increase from before the onset of the pandemic.
Jeff Bezos saw his wealth rise from $113 billion on March 18, 2020 to $242 billion at the end of 2025.
Three Walton family members—Jim, Alice and Rob—saw their combined assets increase from $161.1 billion on March 18, 2020 to $378 billion at the end of 2025.
The extreme concentration of wealth that our continued analysis of billionaires underscores is deeply concerning for the future of our country. These ultra-wealthy individuals have outsized influence on our democratic system—and have actively worked to undermine it. And these spectacular riches comes at the expense of workers, the ones who are actually generating wealth. Social services are being cut while tax burdens are eased on the rich.
Fighting back against wealth concentration will take a two-pronged approach. We have to empower the working class, strengthening unions and improving living conditions. We also have to raise and taxes and close wealth accumulation loopholes, or else billionaire power will only grow.
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