Ira Stoll writes for the Washington Free Beacon about the latest bad idea on Capitol Hill.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, socialist of Vermont, and Rep. Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California best known for trafficking in Epstein-related conspiracy theories, are pushing legislation that would impose a new 5 percent annual wealth tax on billionaires and use the revenue to give money to everyone earning less than $150,000 a year.
The bill, which the politicians are calling the Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share Act, would raise $4.4 trillion over a decade, according to a letter from Emanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, economists at the University of California, Berkeley, that was released by the leftist politicians.
The March 2, 2026, letter from the two economists, on University of California, Berkeley, letterhead, advocated the tax less as a tool to raise revenue and more as a way of curbing what the economists describe as an “unprecedented level” of wealth concentration.
“Democracies become oligarchies when wealth becomes too concentrated,” says the letter. “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.”
Almost as if coordinated, the New York Times unleashed a four-byline project about what it called “America’s New Gilded Age.” The Times story, which was published as a news article, hit nearly the same theme as the Sanders and Khanna press release. “One of the central quandaries the country now faces is how to govern in an era when such vast wealth both controls a large part of the economy and is increasingly used to access political power,” said—OK, you guess, was that from the Times article or the Sanders and Khanna press release?
It was from the Times news article. The Sanders and Khanna press release said, “One of the most important moral and economic issues of our time is the urgent need to confront the obscene level of income and wealth inequality that we are currently experiencing.”
