On March 2nd, The Washington Free Beacon posted an article detailing a tax proposal by Senator Bernie Sanders, socialist of Vermont, and Representative Ro Khanna.

The article reports:

Sen. Bernie Sanders, socialist of Vermont, and Representative Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California best known for trafficking in Epstein-related conspiracy theories, are pushing legislation that would impose a new 5 percent annual wealth tax on billionaires and use the revenue to give money to everyone earning less than $150,000 a year.

The bill, which the politicians are calling the Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share Act, would raise $4.4 trillion over a decade, according to a letter from Emanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, economists at the University of California, Berkeley, that was released by the leftist politicians.

At some point, someone needs to tell Senator Sanders and Representative Khanna that the problem is not the income–the problem is the spending. Americans have learned in the past year that the amount of fraud in government programs is staggering. Congress needs to focus on ending the fraud–not demanding more money.

The article concludes:

It’s easy to understand why Sanders and Khanna would want to tax those fortunes away—they would get to spend the money themselves and use it to diminish the power of forces that constrain unlimited government power. Why the Times wants to pile on in the campaign by French economists and socialist politicians against the non-Sulzberger rich is a separate question.

One billionaire wealth pool that Sanders and Khanna and the Times‘s intrepid investigative journalists don’t seem eager to shine a light on is the New York Times Company itself, whose stock today traded at a price above $81 a share, a record. Leave it to the people with inherited sixth-generation family control of a company with a $12.4 billion enterprise value and political agenda-setting power that, if sharply diminished, remains significant to sound a panicky alarm about the creation of new fortunes.

The funniest thing about the Times billionaire article is the undertone of old-money horror at the arrivistes. “The number of U.S. billionaires jumped 50 percent by some estimates between 2017 and 2025, to more than 900 people,” the Times frets, fulminating about “stunning velocity” and the “colossal leap.” At pro-growth widely read news websites, we call that the American dream of upward mobility and opportunity. Celebrate it rather than complain about it.

When you tax something, you get less of it. A wealth tax will eventually result in less wealth.