The Wealth Tax Is Popular but Faces Serious Obstacles
Billionaire wealth has doubled in five years, and there’s a growing movement to tax it. But there’s a problem: the fate of a national wealth tax may ultimately hinge on a few words buried in an arcane passage in the Constitution.
Americans have favored higher taxes on the wealthy for decades, and that preference is starting to harden into an urgent demand. But to win it would require overcoming a conservative Supreme Court and an obscure constitutional provision. (Jacquelyn Martin Pool / Getty Images)
The United States’ descent into oligarchy was first gradual, then swift. While the ultrarich have been steadily accumulating political power for decades, the election of Donald Trump in 2024 rapidly accelerated the process. Since then, the country’s oligarchs have grown increasingly brazen in their takeover of America’s political, economic, and civil institutions — not unlike the billionaire president himself.
A year and a half into Trump’s second term, the billionaire class has never been wealthier or more powerful. Yet this conspicuous takeover of American society has prompted a predictable backlash that appears to be growing in tandem with the rising wealth and power of the billionaires themselves. Just as the first Gilded Age gave rise to the populist and progressive movements, our current age of extreme inequality has driven more people to support proposals that aim to drastically curb the power and wealth of the oligarchs.
Over the last year, no proposal has gained more traction (or attracted more controversy) than the wealth tax, which would directly target the ballooning fortunes of billionaire tax evaders. Though long advocated by progressives and socialists, the billionaire wealth tax was given a major boost last October when the California chapter of the Service Employees International Union–United Healthcare Workers introduced a ballot measure proposing a one-time 5 percent tax on the state’s two-hundred-plus billionaires to help offset federal cuts to health care from last year’s “Big Beautiful Bill.”
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