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.
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.”
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 with the Trump administration. A recent New York Times analysis found that the share of billionaire spending in politics has ballooned from 0.3% in 2008 (just before the 2010 Citizens United decision deregulated money in politics) to 19% of all campaign dollars in 2024, totaling more than $3bn. That $3bn came from just 300 billionaires and their families, many of whom backed candidates who opposed wealth taxes, including Donald Trump.
The war in Iran has only furthered anti-wealth resentment. 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.
Before the election, New York’s wealthiest claimed they would be fleeing the state en masse if he won; the city has more billionaires than any other on Earth. But polling released the day before election day found that across New York state, a majority of residents support Mamdani’s campaign promise of a corporate tax hike, as well as increasing income tax for the top 5% of earners.
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. Despite Hochul’s seemingly resolute stance against a wealth tax, Democrats added taxing the state’s rich to the proposed state budget this spring. 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.
States like Rhode Island, Hawaii, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Illinois and New Mexico are also considering various forms of wealth tax – from income tax to taxing capital gains to the popular “mansion tax” which taxes expensive real estate sales. Currently, there are at least 17 localities with “mansion taxes,” the majority of which were passed between 2018 and 2023.
California’s fight is perhaps the dirtiest battleground, with two billionaires, Matt Mahan and Tom Steyer, duking it out in a crowded race to replace Governor Gavin Newsom. The state’s wealthy tech class – including the Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale and people affiliated with Thiel – has put a flush of pro-rich money into the race. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, of the 30 billionaires who have donated to a California gubernatorial campaign, 25 donated to Mahan, who was propelled to run by his opposition to the billionaire tax. They have also backed a challenger to Khanna’s seat over his support for the state billionaire tax proposal.
For Karen Sanchez, the fight is personal, too. The billionaire tax aims to replace the $100bn in federal dollars denied to the state’s public healthcare system through Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” last summer. The funding cuts will cause hospital closures and layoffs in the world’s fourth-largest economy “On a good day”, Sanchez says she lives 40 minutes away from the closest hospital.
Right now, her focus is on collecting 875,000 signatures by late June to get the billionaire’s tax on the California ballot. At her local brewery, meeting teachers fundraising and organizers hosting ICE watch trainings – with everyone invested in each other’s fights – Sanchez sees a preview of a world where taxing the rich is a reality.
“It is creating this nice network of groups that are all trying to do good for different reasons,” said Sanchez. “We’re all finally like, ‘Oh, if we all do it all together, then we can really get somewhere.’”
