Billionaire fortunes have reached all-time highs under Trump. So has the movement to tax them

## Summary
Photograph: Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis/Getty Images View image in fullscreen Senator Bernie Sanders speaks at a Tax the Rich rally hosted by the Democratic Socialists of America on 29 March 2026 in New York. Her opening line: “How do you feel about taxing the rich?” Sanchez is volunteering to collect signatures to put a contentious “billionaire tax” on California’s November ballot, sponsored by her union, SEIU – United Healthcare Workers West . Americans understand that there is a lack of fairness in America.” Gavin Newsom comes out swinging against California billionaire tax Read more With these billionaire tax proposals, politicians and advocates hope to capture Americans’ intensifying anger at the rich. The US spent $11.3bn in the first week of its bombardment of Iran, “dwarfing” the cost of the budgets for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Environmental Protection Agency or the National Cancer Institute. “There are so many needs that American families have, and we so often have to hear, ‘Oh, there’s no money for that.’ Well, there’s lots and lots of money,” said Hanauer. “And lo and behold, sometimes they manage to find it for things that the American people don’t even support and won’t benefit from.” Chi Ossé, a progressive New York City councilmember affiliated with the city’s Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) chapter, has also heard this sentiment from constituents and people online. “People have woken up on being angry at billionaires,” he said. “There’s a bigger target on their backs in terms of holding them accountable for how fucked up things are right now … The national conversation is certainly shifting to this level where it’s not just right versus left any more – it’s top versus bottom.” Where the movement is building Perhaps one of the clearest demonstrations of the movement’s popularity was the stunning victory of New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, who campaigned on the need for affordable rents, groceries and transportation in the city, and a commitment to tax the rich.

## Article Content
Senator Bernie Sanders speaks at a Tax the Rich rally hosted by the Democratic Socialists of America on 29 March 2026 in New York.
Photograph: Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis/Getty Images
View image in fullscreen
Senator Bernie Sanders speaks at a Tax the Rich rally hosted by the Democratic Socialists of America on 29 March 2026 in New York.
Photograph: Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis/Getty Images
Billionaire fortunes have reached all-time highs under Trump. So has the movement to tax them
Residents in at least 10 states are organizing campaigns to tax wealth in order to fund schools and other social services
Karen Sanchez likes to meet new people at trivia nights or concerts at her local brewery at the edge of Los Angeles county. Her opening line: “How do you feel about taxing the rich?”
Sanchez is volunteering to collect signatures to put a contentious “billionaire tax” on California’s November ballot, sponsored by her union,
SEIU – United Healthcare Workers West
. The proposal would impose a one-time 5% wealth tax on the state’s 200-plus billionaires to cover lost federal funding for California hospitals and emergency services and to fund public education and food assistance programs. She says most people have been eager to sign on – and want to see more of it.
“You’ve got the people who were like, ‘Why just one time, why aren’t we taxing them more often than that?’ Other people are like, ‘Why just 5%?’” said Sanchez. “A lot of people are like, ‘This should be happening on a bigger scale more often.’”
In
at least 10 states
, residents are organizing campaigns to tax wealth in order to fund
schools, prisons and other social services.
In March,
Washington state passed its first-ever income tax that
targets about 20,000 millionaire households. Laws already exist in states such as Massachusetts and Minnesota, where wealth tax proceeds are paying for preschool and
K-12 meals
and
improving transportation and roads.
View image in fullscreen
People attend a rally in support of fair taxation near the US Capitol in Washington DC on 10 April 2025.
Photograph: Bryan Dozier/Middle East Images/AFP/Getty Images
The interest in billionaire taxes is not only at the state level, but also in cities and counties and at the federal level, too. In March,
Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Ro Khanna
introduced the “Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share Act”, an annual 5% wealth tax for billionaires.
“It’s not just, OK, let’s tax the billionaires,” said Khanna. “It’s the fact that billionaires are putting millions of dollars into supporting private health insurance companies, supporting private defense contractors, supporting the war overseas, supporting the deregulation and busting of unions. Americans understand that there is a lack of fairness in America.”
Gavin Newsom comes out swinging against California billionaire tax
Read more
With these billionaire tax proposals, politicians and advocates hope to capture Americans’ intensifying anger at the rich.
Last fall,
a Data for Progress survey
found that 70% of respondents across age and party lines agreed that “our economic system is rigged in favor of corporations and the wealthy.” It’s for good reason.
In
2017
and
2025
, Trump championed and signed off on tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, and in the 12 months following Trump’s re-election, “billionaire fortunes grew at a rate three times faster than the average annual rate in the previous five years”, according to
Oxfam
. Meanwhile, the federal minimum wage has languished at $7.25 an hour for the last 15 years, the longest period without a change since its creation nearly a century ago.
“People are angry, and they want to see this fixed,” said Amy Hanauer, executive director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (Itep), which has
fought for “tax fairness” since 1980
. “They’re trying to use whatever levers they have – federal, state or local – to get some fixes.”
‘It’s not just right v left — it’s top v bottom’
Class antagonism in the US has been boiling for the better part of the last 20 years.
The Occupy movement
of the early 2010s, with its focus on the divide between the 1% and the 99%, “marked the re-entry of class consciousness into mainstream American politics”,
as Rebecca Nathanson wrote for the Guardian
. In 2016, Sanders challenged what a successful presidential campaign could look like by centering his own on populism and
taxing the rich
, building
on the precedent set by Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition in the 1980s
.
While the Occupy movement faded and Sanders ultimately lost the Democratic nomination, inequality only worsened. Over the last five years,
according to a February Oxfam America report
, “the CEOs of the five largest US companies made an average of $52 million annually, over 1,000 times more than a typical worker earns in a year.”
Meanwhile, tech billionaires – including Peter Thiel of Palantir, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Elon Musk of Tesla and Mark Zuckerberg of Meta – have openly aligned themselves wit

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## Expert Analysis

### Merits
- Last fall, a Data for Progress survey found that 70% of respondents across age and party lines agreed that “our economic system is rigged in favor of corporations and the wealthy.” It’s for good reason.
- The US spent $11.3bn in the first week of its bombardment of Iran, “dwarfing” the cost of the budgets for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Environmental Protection Agency or the National Cancer Institute. “There are so many needs that American families have, and we so often have to hear, ‘Oh, there’s no money for that.’ Well, there’s lots and lots of money,” said Hanauer. “And lo and behold, sometimes they manage to find it for things that the American people don’t even support and won’t benefit from.” Chi Ossé, a progressive New York City councilmember affiliated with the city’s Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) chapter, has also heard this sentiment from constituents and people online. “People have woken up on being angry at billionaires,” he said. “There’s a bigger target on their backs in terms of holding them accountable for how fucked up things are right now … The national conversation is certainly shifting to this level where it’s not just right versus left any more – it’s top versus bottom.” Where the movement is building Perhaps one of the clearest demonstrations of the movement’s popularity was the stunning victory of New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, who campaigned on the need for affordable rents, groceries and transportation in the city, and a commitment to tax the rich.

### Areas for Consideration
- Ossé credited state legislators, many of whom he said were not necessarily aligned with New York City’s left flank of politicians, for taking the issue seriously.

### Implications
- She says most people have been eager to sign on – and want to see more of it. “You’ve got the people who were like, ‘Why just one time, why aren’t we taxing them more often than that?’ Other people are like, ‘Why just 5%?’” said Sanchez. “A lot of people are like, ‘This should be happening on a bigger scale more often.’” In at least 10 states , residents are organizing campaigns to tax wealth in order to fund schools, prisons and other social services.
- Meanwhile, the federal minimum wage has languished at $7.25 an hour for the last 15 years, the longest period without a change since its creation nearly a century ago. “People are angry, and they want to see this fixed,” said Amy Hanauer, executive director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (Itep), which has fought for “tax fairness” since 1980 . “They’re trying to use whatever levers they have – federal, state or local – to get some fixes.” ‘It’s not just right v left — it’s top v bottom’ Class antagonism in the US has been boiling for the better part of the last 20 years.
- In 2016, Sanders challenged what a successful presidential campaign could look like by centering his own on populism and taxing the rich , building on the precedent set by Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition in the 1980s .
- Building on this momentum, Ossé went to the state capitol with 1,500 New York City residents in February to push Governor Kathy Hochul to allow the city to increase taxes for millionaires – a change that requires state approval.

### Expert Commentary
This article covers tax, state, billionaire topics. Notable strengths include discussion of tax. Areas of concern are also raised. Readability: Flesch-Kincaid grade 0.0. Word count: 1657.