The Founders’ Warnings About Excess Wealth Have Come Appallingly True

Instead, we must declare our own independence from the influence of the oligarchy by pursuing a set of reforms that are targeted toward reducing their power and building up our own. That means using tax policy as a way to reduce the wealth of the ultrawealthy by aggressively taxing their wealth, incomes, and estates. Doing so is essential for constructing a new system that generates the revenue we need for rebuilding the working class with programs that benefit working families, such as universal childcare, affordable housing, and climate-resilient infrastructure. We must also deploy policy tools to break up the dangerous concentrations of power threatening our economic growth, democracy, and climate.

Reining in billionaire control is incredibly popular: 77 percent of voters support raising taxes on the ultrawealthy, including 65 percent of Republicans and 75 percent of independents. Three in five (62 percent) prefer a candidate who supports raising taxes on billionaires, versus just 12 percent who prefer one who opposes it—a 50-point gap. Among Democratic primary voters, that gap widens to 79 points (83–4). This is because voters are living the consequences the Founders warned of—they cannot afford housing, health care, childcare, or other basic needs. They yearn for the upward mobility of previous generations. The American dream isn’t just fading—it is being erased by billionaires who are actively enriching themselves at the expense of the rest of us. They wield their extreme wealth as weapons, bending our democracy to their own agenda like kings—and as the Founders foretold.

Using the tax code to break up this concentrated wealth and power isn’t radical, it’s actually our founding-era orthodoxy. It’s time for our leaders to tax greed.