As wealth taxes gain momentum from Sacramento to Washington state, Sen. Bernie Sanders says 938 people stand between most working Americans and a $3,000 check.
In a scathing op-ed published Wednesday in The Guardian, the Vermont senator named every name and put every number on the table. “The richest people in America have never ever had it so good,” he wrote, while mentioning that 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and 85 million are uninsured or underinsured.
“We have a tax code that is totally rigged—written by representatives of the wealthy to benefit the wealthy,” he wrote in the op-ed, while also referencing estimates from the Rand Corporation that found nearly $80 trillion in wealth has been redistributed from the bottom 90% to the top 1% over the past 50 years.
Sanders is making headlines for once again calling for billionaires to pay up. Last month, he and Rep. Ro Khanna introduced the Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share Act that would put a 5% tax on the estimated 938 billionaires in the country and raise an expected $4.4 trillion over a decade. A portion of the first year’s revenue will be redistributed in the form of $3,000 checks to anyone making less than $150,000 a year.
The funds raised through the proposed tax would be enough to repeal the Medicaid cuts that threw 15 million Americans off coverage, fund universal childcare, guarantee teachers a $60,000 minimum salary, expand Medicare to cover dental, vision and hearing, and build 7 million affordable housing units.
Sanders calls out billionaires
For Sanders, who has long called for the wealthy to pay up, the tax has never been so needed.
“The American working class has been under savage attack for years,” he wrote in the op-ed. That’s due to the disparity between what the rich and those in the working class pay. Sanders name-dropped Elon Musk, saying his net worth of $805 billion is more wealth than the bottom 53% of American households put together. But according to Sanders, the richest man in the world pays an effective tax rate of just 3.3%, lower than the 8.4% paid by an average truck driver.
Had the 5% billionaire tax been put into effect last year, Sanders noted that Musk—expected to become the world’s first trillionaire—would hardly notice the difference. “Let me tell you how insane the level of wealth inequality is in America today,” Sanders wrote. “Musk would have owed $42 billion more in taxes, leaving him with just $792 billion to survive.”
The Tesla CEO wasn’t the only one in the senator’s crosshairs. Warren Buffett, who has long made comments about ensuring the ultra-wealthy pay their fair share and famously made comments about having a lower effective tax rate than his secretary—pays just 0.1%, while a schoolteacher pays 9.8%, Sanders said. Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, with a net worth of $109 billion, had an effective tax rate of 1.3%, compared to the 13.3% paid by the average registered nurse.
The names didn’t stop there. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos paid less than 1% in taxes, when the average firefighter paid 8.7%, according to Sanders. Had the billionaire tax been enacted last year, Bezos would’ve paid $11 billion, leaving him with a paltry $207 billion. Meta cofounder Mark Zuckerberg would have $209 billion left after paying $11 billion more with the tax enacted.
Political support for the tax
There is growing political support for such taxes. In an opinion poll, Californians backed a similar (albeit, one-time) billionaire tax by a 2-to-1 margin to protect 3 million people from losing healthcare. More than half (62%) of New Yorkers support Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s proposed 2% surtax on millionaires and billionaires. Nationally, more than six in 10 Americans say the wealthy and large corporations pay too little in taxes, and one in five think it’s morally wrong to be that rich.
The ultra-wealthy, however, aren’t waiting around to find out if anyone listens. Google cofounders Larry Page (with a net worth $244 billion) and Sergey Brin (with a net worth $226 billion) rushed to leave California before the January 1, 2026 deadline set by the proposed Billionaire Tax Act, both purchasing property in Florida. Howard Schultz and Zuckerberg followed last month. They join Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, Ken Griffin, and Larry Ellison, all of whom have already bought property or moved operations to the Sunshine State in recent years.
