Sen. Bernie Sanders has wasted no time telling the incoming Democratic Congress what its victory is for, and he put the whole programme in one answer: tax billionaires, and spend the money on working-class America. "I want to see a tax on billionaires," Sanders said on Jon Stewart's Weekly Show. "The legislation that I have, a 5% annual tax on billionaires, would bring in about $400 billion a year. With that money, we could start the process of building 7 million units of low-income and affordable housing, put people to work addressing the housing crisis, universal and free childcare, free public colleges and universities, and in the first year, a $3,000 stipend for every working-class person in America to get them through difficult times."
The legislation he means is the Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share Act, introduced with Rep. Ro Khanna. By Sanders' office's own account, it would levy the 5% annual tax on 938 American billionaires who collectively hold more than $8.2 trillion, and would raise an estimated $4.4 trillion over ten years. Sanders' favourite illustration is Elon Musk: under the bill, he says, Musk would have owed $42 billion more last year — "leaving him with just $792 billion to survive." The revenue figures are Sanders' and his office's estimates for what the tax would raise; they are his case for the bill, not an independent score.
The argument underneath the numbers is the one Sanders has made for a decade, sharpened by the midterm result: the top 1% now owns more wealth than the bottom 93%, one man — Musk — owns more than the bottom 53% of American households, and billionaires, he says, pay a lower effective tax rate than truck drivers and nurses. With Democrats taking both chambers in January, Sanders is pressing his party to spend its majority on this agenda from day one — the same list he set out in his post-election address: the wealth tax, Medicare for All, a moratorium on AI data centres, a $20 minimum wage.
What stands between the pitch and the law is also plain. Democrats will hold Congress, but President Trump keeps the veto, and a wealth tax of this kind has never passed either chamber — its constitutionality has never been settled by the Supreme Court. Sanders is undeterred; his point in the interview is that the election has changed who writes the bills.
For working families, what Sanders is promising is concrete, and it is worth hearing in his own terms: a $3,000 payment for every working-class person in the first year — $12,000 for a family of four — rents eased by 7 million new affordable homes, childcare bills ended, and college tuition wiped away, all of it, he says, paid for by fewer than a thousand of the richest people in the country. Whether Congress can pass it and a president would sign it are separate questions — but the offer itself is now the Democratic programme's opening bid, and every household doing the maths on rent, childcare and tuition will be measuring the new Congress against it.
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