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Posted by Joshua Scheer
A new bill from Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna would impose a 5% annual tax on billionaire wealth—raising trillions to fund healthcare, housing, childcare, and direct payments for working families.
At a time when nearly two-thirds of Americans live paycheck to paycheck while a handful of oligarchs accumulate obscene fortunes, a new bill introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Ro Khanna aims to confront the grotesque concentration of wealth at the top of American society.
The “Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share Act” proposes a simple but radical idea in a country dominated by billionaire power: tax the rich. Specifically, the legislation would impose a 5% annual tax on the wealth of billionaires, targeting roughly 938 individuals whose combined wealth has reached $8.2 trillion.
According to economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, the measure could raise $4.4 trillion over the next decade—revenue Sanders says should be used not for corporate subsidies or endless wars but for the basic needs of ordinary people.
“This legislation demands that the billionaire class in America finally pay their fair share,” Sanders said when introducing the bill, arguing that the U.S. economy increasingly works for “the 1%.”
The Billionaire Economy
The bill arrives amid levels of wealth inequality not seen since the robber-baron era of the late 19th century. Over the past several decades, trillions of dollars have flowed upward into the hands of a tiny financial elite while wages for working people stagnated.
Today, a handful of tech and finance tycoons control fortunes larger than the economic output of entire countries. Under the proposed wealth tax, some of the richest figures in the country would finally be forced to contribute something close to their fair share.
For example:
- Elon Musk—worth roughly $833 billion—would owe about $42 billion in taxes in a single year.
- Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos would each owe roughly $11 billion annually.
Even after paying, they would remain among the richest human beings in the history of the planet.
What the Money Would Do
Unlike the bipartisan consensus in Washington that funnels public wealth into military contractors and corporate tax breaks, Sanders’ proposal explicitly redirects resources to working people.
Among the bill’s provisions:
- $3,000 direct payments to every person in households earning $150,000 or less ($12,000 for a family of four).
- Expansion of Medicare to cover dental, vision, and hearing.
- Reversal of cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act.
- Construction of more than seven million affordable homes to eliminate the housing shortage.
- Universal affordable childcare, capped at 7% of household income.
- A $60,000 minimum salary for public school teachers.
- Expanded home health care for seniors and people with disabilities.
In other words: the resources exist to dramatically improve life for millions of Americans—if the billionaire class is forced to give up a sliver of its hoarded wealth.
The Real Obstacle: Oligarchic Power
Predictably, corporate lobbyists and their allies in Congress are already mobilizing against the proposal. Wall Street and Silicon Valley have spent decades rewriting the tax code to protect vast fortunes through loopholes, capital gains privileges, and offshore tax havens.
The real question is not whether the United States can afford these programs. The richest country in the history of the world clearly can.
The question is whether the billionaire class—which already wields extraordinary influence over both major political parties—will allow even modest redistribution of its wealth.
Sanders argues the answer depends on mass political pressure.
“Enough is enough,” he said. “Billionaires cannot have it all.”
A Choice Between Democracy and Oligarchy
The bill ultimately poses a stark choice for the United States:
Continue down the path of extreme inequality—where wealth and power accumulate in the hands of a tiny elite—or begin reclaiming democratic control over an economy built by the labor of millions.
For decades, the American political system has treated billionaire wealth as untouchable.
The Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share Act challenges that premise directly.
And for the first time in a long time, Washington is being asked a simple question: Why should billionaires exist at all in a democratic society?
Doing the Math on a Billionaire Wealth Tax
In announcing the legislation, Bernie Sanders pointed to an analysis by economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman at the University of California, Berkeley. Their research examines what would happen if a 5% annual wealth tax had been applied to the fortunes of America’s ten richest individuals for every year they have held billionaire status.
The results illustrate how dramatically such a policy could curb the runaway accumulation of wealth at the very top. Over time, the researchers found, a 5% tax would significantly reduce the massive fortunes built by the ultra-rich—cutting them roughly in half compared with their current levels.
Take Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and currently the richest person in the United States. If a 5% wealth tax had been applied annually since he first became a billionaire in 2012, his estimated fortune would stand at roughly $363 billion instead of about $745 billion today.
The same pattern appears across the billionaire class. Larry Page, cofounder of Google, would have seen his wealth fall from approximately $258 billion to about $83 billion if the tax had been applied each year since he first crossed the billionaire threshold in 2004.
The researchers argue that the stakes extend beyond simple revenue collection. Extreme concentrations of wealth, they warn, threaten the very foundations of democratic governance.
“Democracies become oligarchies when wealth becomes too concentrated,” Saez and Zucman wrote in their analysis. “The U.S. has now reached an unprecedented level of top wealth concentration.”
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