Pity the Billionaires: They are Very Sad About Taxes

At a time when hundreds of thousands of people across this country are taking to the streets–and taking their lives into their hands–to protect their neighbors and our democracy from attacks by our own government, deciding if they can pay for food OR gas, and going without essential medications, billionaires would like to call your attention to another urgent issue: They may have to pay taxes.

In fact, in February, someone planned a march to publicize their plight.

March for Billionaires — San Francisco, Feb 7

Stand up for the entrepreneurs, innovators, and risk-takers who build our economy. February 7, 2026.

The "March for Billionaires" was, um, lightly attended. Mission Local reported that the "billionaire bacchanal was a big bust." The idea that today's billionaires–too many of them in league with the most corrupt regime in U.S. history and eagerly lobbying Congress to destroy every last vestige of the social safety net–needed a march is Monty Python material.

In fact, today's billionaires have it pretty damn good. They get billions in tax breaks and subsidies for everything from football stadiums to warehouses and research projects that may only benefit their businesses. They frequently pay workers too little and work them too hard, then deny them healthcare, parental leave, and other critical benefits. Because of their wealth, they can press the elected officials to whose campaigns they've donated to divert critical resources like water and electricity to feed their project, raising the costs for people already struggling to afford basics, but will never see gains from these enterprises. And their insatiable demands to cut government spending on the greater good often leads to less well off people losing their livelihoods.

Billionaires don't need marches nor do they need sympathy. They need to pay their fair share.

Policy failures

Dan Riffle, former senior counsel to Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez coined the term "every billionaire is a policy failure." As Ocasio-Cortez herself said: "A system that allows billionaires to exist when there are parts of Alabama where people are still getting ringworm because they don’t have access to public health is wrong.”

I agree.

There are now roughly 3,400 billionaires in the world, up from 306 in 2000. According to Forbes, the United States has 989 billionaire and centi-billionaires (over $100 billion), more than any other country. Inherited wealth, monopoly power, and crony capitalism are the three main sources of how billionaires are made. Many of today's billionaires are using their money to support the fascist right. It does not hurt that thanks to Supreme Court Justice John Roberts and friends, they can rely on the Citizens United decision to flood the political zone with money. Dolla, dolla bills, y'all.

And, as the saying goes, the rich get richer: A 2019 report by Oxfam notes, "extreme wealth takes on a momentum of its own" no matter where it comes from because the super-rich have the money to spend on the best investment advice. It pays off: Billionaire wealth has "increased since 2009 by an average of 11 percent a year, far higher than rates ordinary savers can obtain." Billionaires are also apparently supported by the Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners (STEP), "a secretive organization of over 20,000 wealth managers that actively pressures governments to reduce taxes on the richest."

While the United States has the most billionaires, it also has the highest levels of wealth inequality among countries of similar economic status. According to the Urban Institute, "America witnessed a massive transfer of wealth from the middle class to the wealthiest families" over the last 60 years. "In 1963, the wealthiest families had 36 times the wealth of families in the middle of the wealth distribution. By 2022, they had 71 times the wealth of families in the middle."

These trends affect everyone in the working and middle classes, while also widening racial income gaps.

The Artful Dodgers

According to the same Oxfam report: "The super-rich use their wealth to pay as little tax as possible, making active use of a secretive global network of tax havens, as revealed by the Panama Papers and other exposés." Another study cited by Oxfam showed that "the super-rich [worldwide] are paying as much as 30 percent less tax than they should, denying governments billions in lost tax revenue, that could have been spent on schools or on hospitals."

It's not only that these folk become massively wealthy, it's that they fight so hard to get things they want irrespective of the hidden costs to the rest of us, while fighting even harder to avoid paying their fair share. They lobby against the spending required to ensure everyone can live with dignity. They cause active harm to others to put an additional dollar in their own pockets. And they endanger all of us by fighting regulations on everything from environmental safety and hate speech to crypto, surveillance tech, and AI.

Wanna be rich like Jeff Bezos? Build a business in which workers suffer twice the rate of injuries than other similar industries, and pay them so little they can't afford food and rent.

Need to reduce the excessive rate of injuries in your warehouses? Cook your books and hope no one notices. Have $250 billion in the bank but want more, more, more? Buy a bunch of factories and throw people out of work, just because you can. "Need" the biggest yacht in the world to address possible insecurities? Build one that would require the city of Rotterdam to destroy a historic bridge so your super-phallic symbol can get to sea. (Rotterdam refused.) Want to help destroy the free press in America? Buy one of the nation's oldest newspapers, hire incompetent people to run it, then gut it when it's no longer politically useful, even though saving it would cost you as much as you make in three days.

While the above actions were taken by Bezos, you could almost sub in Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Mark Andreessen, and any number of other billionaires for each of these problems because they all think social responsibility is for suckers.

Yet their wealth was built with your tax dollars. While they are not paying their share of taxes, billionaires ask for a LOT of money in tax breaks for their businesses. Amazon, for example, received nearly $12 billion in subsidies across the United State between 2000 and 2025. That means your tax dollars were invested in Amazon so Bezos could become one of the richest men in the world, refuse to pay his own taxes, and work with Donald Trump to break the healthcare system. In addition, despite all the tax breaks and the fact that Bezos' net worth rose from $113 billion in 2020 to nearly $25o billion in 2026, Amazon laid off 16,000 workers in the U.S., Canada, and Costa Rica to "strengthen the company," otherwise known as increasing profits for shareholders.

Winning yet?

It's getting worse. The Trump family is the epitome of crony capitalism and monopoly power. President Trump presides over the most corrupt administration in U.S. history, using the office of the presidency to make money hand over fist for himself and his family through a combination of extortion, cooptation of resources, and shady deals. David D. Kirkpatrick writes in The New Yorker that in his second term, the Trump family's "take" from the presidency now exceeds $4 billion dollars, and we are not even halfway through this nightmare. This was before Trump started a war on Iran for no apparent reason under which his sons are now securing government weapons contracts while you pay far more for gas and other goods and services. And we won't see any of that money reinvested in our communities: Trump is the biggest tax dodger of them all.

All of these things are bad for people and our democracy. So, when titans of astronomical wealth throw a tantrum when asked to bear a share of the costs of the human and physical infrastructure on which their prosperity is built, it only adds insult to injury.

The California Ballot Initiative

And yet throw tantrums they do. There are, for example, between 200 and 250 billionaires in California. Some of them are now very, very upset about a proposed ballot initiative that would impose a one-time tax on the wealthiest Californians to make up for cuts to Medicaid and to ensure more working families have enough food to eat.

Writing in The Atlantic, Rogé Karma explains that the [California] ballot initiative originated in response to massive tax cuts for corporations and rich individuals passed last year by Republicans at the urging of President Trump. The tax cuts were paid for by deep cuts to Medicaid, leaving "a roughly $20 billion annual shortfall in California’s health-care budget, which could result in 1.6 million low-income Californians losing their health care."

Let me repeat that: Could result in 1.6 million low-income Californians losing their health care.

"In response," Karma writes, "one of the state’s largest health-care-employee unions teamed up with a group of progressive economists and lawyers to come up with a way to make up the difference: impose a one-off 5 percent wealth tax on California’s billionaires."

Karma continues:

The logic is simple enough: The ultra-wealthy, who amass their fortunes by owning assets as opposed to earning wages, pay very little in income taxes. According to calculations by the Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez, who helped design the proposal, California’s billionaires pay approximately $3 billion to $4 billion a year in state income taxes, or less than 0.2 percent of their collective net worth of $2.2 trillion. He and the other architects of the ballot initiative determined that tapping into this pool of mostly untaxed wealth would be the most economically fair way to raise the money California needs, especially given that those same billionaires had just received a major tax break from Trump. “Right now, our tax system effectively fails to tax the superrich,” Gabriel Zucman, another economist involved with the proposal, told me. “If you want to raise a lot of revenue, you need to focus on wealth.”

Meanwhile, the Trump/GOP budget is already taking a toll. In California, the Orange County Register reported this week that hospitals, "stripped of billions of dollars in federal and state funding for health care," have laid off thousands due to Trump cuts, with more to come as further cuts are made.

An analysis by Price Waterhouse Cooper suggests that the California tax "potentially could raise approximately $100 billion in one-time revenue allocated primarily to healthcare funding and food assistance programs." [Emphasis added.]

Queue the drama and the march that wasn't. As the signature campaign for the ballot initiative got off the ground, billionaires threatened to leave California, which led to handwringing by conservatives as well as some Democrats, like Governor Gavin Newsom, who opposes the tax because reasons.

Voters, however, appear to be in favor. A new poll from UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies released just last week found a majority (52 percent) of voters back the proposed tax, with at least 15 percent as yet undecided.

The so-called "billionaire exodus" from California? Didn't happen. A total of six billionaires moved to other states. Sergie Brin and Larry Page, co-founders of Google, moved to Miami before the January 2026 deadline on which the tax is based. Peter Thiel also left for Miami, and David Sacks moved his home base to Austin, Texas.

It is, of course, their choice of where to live. But leaving the state of California because you'd owe a one-time tax that would make up a huge gap in healthcare and food security for millions of people caused by the enormous tax cut you received just the year before, not to mention after you've taken advantage of the state's extraordinary resources to build your wealth, is the essence of what is wrong with wealth, power, social responsibility, and accountability in this country. Just like Bezos' demands that a historic bridge be moved to accommodate his vanity project, it is a marker of the abject selfishness, irresponsibility, and lack of care for the rest of the country with which a large share of the wealthiest among us is rightly associated. They want to eat every night for a year at The French Laundry, a three star Michelin restaurant, but never pay the bill.

Billionaires Bonding

Even after leaving California, the same guys want to control what happens. Brin, for example, has spent $45 million to date to defeat the California ballot initiative, with more than seven months to go. And he's not alone, notes Dara Kerr at The Guardian. "[Google's] former CEO Eric Schmidt donated $1.02m, adding to a previous $2m contribution."

Peter Thiel put down $3 million so far, according to Kerr, as did other tech and crypto billionaires, including DoorDash CEO Tony Xu ($2m), Stripe CEO Patrick Collison ($7m), Ring founder James Siminoff ($100,000), and crypto billionaire Chris Larsen ($750,000). Defeating the wealth tax in California is an urgent project for these billionaires given what I suspect is their real concern: an increasing number of states are considering similar tax strategies.

Building a Better California, an anti-wealth tax Super Pac, is now sponsoring a concurrent ballot measure called “Protect Retirements” that sounds as Orwellian as it likely needs to be to confuse voters. Better California also claims to focus on public investments in housing, infrastructure, and education. Where will they get the money? Perhaps they'll hire Sam Bankman Fried to cover the inevitable funding gaps.

Billionaires also panicked about the Seattle mayoral campaign of relative newcomer Katie Wilson, who spent two decades in the city working construction and organizing transit riders before being elected. Wilson apparently decided to run the night voters passed a ballot initiative on which she'd been working to fund social housing, a major victory for housing advocates and the large number of residents priced out of the city's housing market. Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat writes that the victory "electrified" Wilson.

Like Zohran Mamdani in New York, Wilson ran against and defeated a well-known politician in the primary. Virginia Heffernan wrote in The New Republic that "the city’s billionaires snapped to attention" after Wilson "bested [incumbent Bruce] Harrell in the nonpartisan August primary by pledging to make Seattle more humane" (in part through higher taxes on the rich).

First, real estate developers, spooked by Wilson’s zeal for rent control and social housing, gave generously to a pro-Harrell PAC. The billionaire co-owners of the Seattle Mariners, T-Mobile founder John Stanton and crypto baron Christopher Larson, followed close behind. In the end, the Harrell PAC raised more than four times as much as the Wilson PAC. Harrell also nabbed the endorsement of Pete Buttigieg (Oxford, 2007; McKinsey, 2007–2010).

Nevertheless, Wilson won.

Washington state may be less enamored of billionaires than others. Bezos was the first to leave Washington, but, apparently, nobody misses him. According to Robert Cruickshank, a Seattle-based climate, transportation, and housing expert, “When Jeff Bezos left for Miami in 2023, local right-wingers tried to blame it on Washington’s new capital gains tax. Bezos said he wanted to live closer to his and Lauren Sanchez’s family. Here in Seattle, Bezos wasn’t missed - and we didn’t buy the claims he left because of taxes. In 2024 voters statewide upheld that capital gains tax anyway, with strong support from Seattle voters.” Bon voyage, Jeff!

Earlier this month, Washington's Senate passed Senate Bill 6346 just two days after the state House passed a similar measure to create the first personal income tax in nearly a century. Assuming Governor Bob Ferguson signs it, the tax is projected to yield $3.4 billion in annual revenue from roughly 21,000 filers, less than half of one percent of the state’s population," according to Ahmad Abbas in IMI.

Dire predictions during last year's mayoral race about what would happen to New York City if Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani won the election were also dead wrong. According to a Forbes analysis, 26 billionaires (16 from New York City, and the rest from around country) spent at least $100,000 each to defeat Mamdani in the race for mayor of New York City, including the family of current New York police commissioner Jessica Tisch.

Two men generally known for supporting the Democratic party, Reid Hoffman and Barry Diller, invested $250,000 each to defeat Mamdani in the primary. Hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman worked assiduously to prevent Mamdani from becoming mayor of New York City because he predicted Mamdani's policies would cause mass outmigration of wealthy New Yorkers. Ackman invested in an anti-Mamdani PAC, endorsed disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo, and used his social media account to frantically hammer predictions of the imminent fall of the Empire City.

His fellow billionaire, former NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg, with an estimated wealth north of $100 billion, gave $5 million to anti-Mamdani PACs, after shelling out $8 million during the primary to promote Cuomo. Joseph Gebbia (Airbnb), Alice Walton (Walmart), Reed Hastings (Netflix), and casino magnate Steve Wynn also invested to defeat Mamdani.

Alas, again they failed: Mamdani was inaugurated on January 1st.

These billionaires made clear their affections for a corrupt sexual harasser over Mamdani in no small part because Mamdani promised to focus on the often-ignored Black, Brown, and Asian members of the working class, and to deliver free buses and universal childcare. (And, of course, because he is Muslim.) To them, spending money to ensure that poor and working class Americans don't just survive but can thrive is a threat to their business models and to their pockets. And they'll spend more than they owe in taxes to avoid supporting the general welfare.

Unfortunately for the naysayers and those who hoped to see him fail, Mamdani and New York Governor Kathy Hochul teamed up last month to get the first piece of universal childcare off the ground with a $1.2 billion commitment to support early child care and early education efforts in New York City, including $73 million for the first 2,000 2-K seats in the city.

Even after all of this, lo and behold, the New York billionaires remain in New York City.

Taxing the Rich is Critical to Our Democracy

Yes, there are billionaires who support paying their taxes and do. But the rapid growth of the billionaire class is a threat to our democracy, dramatically increases the wealth gap, and gives a small "super class" more and more power over our lives. It's not that we can't afford universal healthcare, excellent educational institutions, free college, and thriving wages. It's that today's billionaires are not interested in making sure the people of this country thrive, and they've succeeded in buying a Supreme Court that protects them. They operate on a profoundly self-centered ethic. Yet, in the famous words of former GOP Congressman Paul Ryan, they are the real "takers:" All for me, none for you.

When anything can be bought and then destroyed, nothing matters, not the free press, not free speech, not art and history, not the environment on which all life depends, nor the food, clothing, and housing people need to live in dignity. This is not the world in which I want my kids, or yours, to live.

As we fight to extricate ourselves from the quicksand of fascism, taxing the wealthy and expanding the Supreme Court must be at the core of any Democratic agenda. The success of these efforts will depend on all of us, first to elect a majority Democratic and Senate made up of fighters, while replacing those who have failed us so far. We'll have to keep pressure on candidates and elected officials to do the hard things that have so long been ignored. Billionaires will kick and scream, but just as good parents must, we have to ignore their tears and tantrums until they get the point.

I am optimistic in part because the discussion is already live, proposals are being debated, and voters are showing they are very tired of being had. Among the ideas on the table are the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act, to be reintroduced during this Congress by Representative Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), Congressman Brendan F. Boyle (D-PA), and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA.), estimated to raise at least $3 trillion in revenue over 10 years; a 5 percent annual wealth tax proposed by Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Congressman Ro Khanna (D-CA); the Billionaires Income Tax Act, introduced last fall by Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR). and Congressmen Steve Cohen (D-TN) and Don Byer (D-VA); and the Robinhood Act, introduced in December by Congressman Dan Goldman (D-NY).

At this point, however, these are just press releases. We have a long fight ahead. and nothing can be taken for granted. Demanding that elected officials and those who want your vote actually value you and your life is the minimum you must demand. It's their damn job. Elected officials must do everything they can to make the dramatic changes in the conditions that brought us here, and ensure everyone pays their fair share.