While President Trump is being criticized for requiring certain able-bodied food stamp recipients to work, volunteer, or participate in qualifying education or training to continue receiving benefits, liberals and socialists across the country are calling on the government to “tax the rich,” a demand echoed by politicians such as New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
In Congress, Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Ro Khanna have introduced the Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share Act, which would impose a 5 percent annual tax on the net worth of the country’s roughly
938 billionaires. The United States currently has no federal net-worth tax; the proposal would tax accumulated wealth rather than income.
When Elon Musk was named Time’s Person of the Year in 2021, Senator Elizabeth Warren said he should “actually pay taxes and stop freeloading off everyone else.” That same year, Musk said he would pay more than $11 billion in taxes, reportedly the largest individual tax bill in U.S. history.
The top 1 percent of earners already pay 38.4 percent of all federal income taxes, while the bottom fifth of households has an effective federal income tax rate of negative 11 percent. Yet the Sanders–Khanna bill would send $3,000 to every member of households earning $150,000 or less, including the bottom 20 percent already living off government handouts.