The Man Who Loves To Tax

Issues & Insights ^ | 6 Mar, 2026 | I & I Editorial Board

[MtnClimber]

The cranky Vermont senator who believes billionaires should be abolished wants to legislate them out of existence. It’s too bad that he doesn’t understand that one billionaire is more valuable than a thousand Bernie Sanders.

“Billionaires should not exist,” Sanders, who identifies as a socialist, raged in 2019 during his previous attempt to hit the wealthy with an additional tax that punished them for their success.

That effort, the New York Times reported, was “particularly aggressive in how it would erode the fortunes of billionaires” and “would cut in half the wealth of the typical billionaire after 15 years, according to two economists who worked with the Sanders campaign on the plan.”

This time, Sanders wants to ensure that the billionaires who are fleeing California because the politics of jealousy in the state almost assure the passage of the proposed billionaire tax have nowhere to go to avoid the levy. He and Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna of California have introduced a bill that imposes a 5% annual wealth tax on the country’s billionaires.

Like Robert Reich, the University of California, Berkeley professor and presidential economic adviser, Sanders and Khanna would be pleased to see billionaires driven into extinction.

There are not quite 1,000 billionaires in the U.S. Roughly 200 of them are still in California, even after the departures of PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, and others who don’t wish to have their earned wealth seized by greedy hands and redistributed politically. It would take a while to drive them all to extinction, but it’s obvious that Sanders and the others who play the politics of envy would sadistically enjoy a painfully drawn-out eradication.

Naturally, they stake out a position based on morality, but if they get their way, they will do deep harm to the country. An advanced economy that has no billionaires is an economy that is in decline. Any economy that loses even a portion of its billionaires will suffer similarly.

Billionaires aren’t caricatures in board games. They are indispensable to prosperity, not just their own but that of all of us. They create wealth, generate jobs, add trillions in value to society, develop lifesaving innovations, efficiently allocate capital, fund charities and philanthropic causes, take risks few others would dare to, and send an immense amount of dollars to the U.S. Treasury (the top 1% of taxpayers were responsible for 40% of federal revenues).

And what has Sanders done? He’s built nothing and lives to tear down what others have produced. He stirs up resentment, rails against choice, has been trying to slay the oligarch dragons for more than three decades, and wants to force the country to join a commune that he designs and runs.

Maybe we were wrong. A single billionaire isn’t more valuable than a thousand Bernie Sanders. A single billionaire is more valuable than a million Bernie Sanders.

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TOPICS: Business/Economy; Society
KEYWORDS: berniesanders; california; leftism; rokhanna; vermont

[MtnClimber]

Maybe have a tax on people who want power over others. But what would you tax? Maybe tax their breathing since they are so concerned about CO2.

[sauropod]

Bkmk

[Repeal The 17th]

Exodus 20:17:
“You shall not covet your neighbor’s house;
you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife,
nor his male servant, nor his female servant,
nor his ox, nor his donkey,
nor anything that is your neighbor’s.”

[Dad was my hero]

well it is common knowledge that billionaires have a checking account or two and a couple savings accounts where their money just sits there collecting 5, maybe 10% interest. It isn’t like their wealth is based on the value of things they own or operate like businesses that employ hundreds to even thousands of people and if you decided to “tax” their “billions” it isn’t like they’d have to liquidate those businesses to pay the taxes and thereby putting many of those people they employ out of work.

I mean, come-on we all know and have that common knowledge that the elected class, especially the demon party knows about wealth. (is this where I put the sarcasm tag...?) d;^/

[Bobbyvotes]

Sanders is too dumb to understand wealth is not a static quantity. Wealth must be created via business activity or agriculture. Sanders thinks by robbing billionaires every one else will have more money. That will last only a short time because once the billionaires are squeezed out, all the wealth creating business activity vanishes also.

[allendale]

Problem is that the vast majority of the elected Democrats are people who in their careers never had a job that actually produced anything. They have no idea how wealth is actually created.

[dadgum]

“Billionaires should not exist,”

Wrong.

Parasitic socialists and communists should be eradicated.

What’s your net worth now, Bernie?
A lot more than your supporters.
Sell it all and live in poverty, you goddamned hypocrite!!!

[sport]

Sanders is not the Lone Ranger to think along those lines. Thanks to the media and the Educational System, a good portion of the American people now think along those lines.

[dadgum]

I think you misspelled “Indoctrination System”.
There is very little education in public schools.n

[sport]

I probably did.

[lowbridge]

““Billionaires should not exist,” Sanders, who identifies as a socialist, raged in 2019”

He used to say the same about millionaires...until he became a millionaire himself (in 2016).

[Libloather]

Here’s How Much Bernie Sanders Spent on Private Jets While Fighting Climate Change - $550,000

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/amy-curtis/2026/02/05/sanders-private-jet-n2670724