The sequence of events over the past few months reads like a case study in how oligarchy actually works in America. First, billionaires passed legislation to enrich themselves. Then they shut down the government to avoid helping working Americans afford health care—a system those same billionaires profit from. And now, they’re trying to leverage the shutdown to fire thousands of workers who protect vulnerable Americans while gutting programs millions of families depend on.
This is a moment that demands a response. If Democrats can’t run on a unified platform that centralizes and prioritizes taxing the ultrawealthy in order to dismantle their stranglehold on our government, then they need to get out of the way for people who will.
Let’s start with the “One Big Beautiful Bill”—a piece of legislation that delivers more than 70 percent of its benefits to the richest fifth of Americans in 2026. The richest 1 percent will receive an average net tax cut of $66,000—at a cost of $1 trillion. Meanwhile, the bill would result in 14 million more Americans becoming uninsured by 2034, with more than $1 trillion in cuts coming from Medicaid alone—the largest cuts in the program’s history, and a stunning transfer of wealth, almost dollar for dollar, from the poorest Americans to the richest.
Republicans’ refusal to fund health care for working Americans caused the shutdown of our government, and the administration is now joyfully inflicting suffering on vulnerable Americans—schoolchildren, low-income families, unhoused people, and senior citizens.
Led by budget chief Russ Vought, Trump is trying to fire more than 4,000 federal workers across at least seven agencies and is seeking “north of 10,000” layoffs. A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to immediately halt the firings, but that order is temporary.
At the Department of Housing and Urban Development, dozens of people who investigate claims of discrimination and abuse have been slated for termination, along with roughly 100 employees who conduct inspections to ensure the quality and safety of federally supported housing—housing that low-income families and seniors depend on.
The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, which ensures students with disabilities receive legally mandated services, has been decimated. The office was already stripped of half its staff earlier this year, with seven of 12 regional offices closed and the remaining attorneys left with crushing caseloads of 300 or more cases and a backlog of 25,000 cases. Federal workers in the Office of Special Education Programs—almost all of whom have been targeted for elimination—typically ensure that states and school districts follow the law in spending federal money on students with disabilities. Without that oversight, vulnerable children will fall through the cracks.
Trump himself made the cruelty explicit, telling reporters he was laying off “people that the Democrats want,” adding that further cuts would “just deepen pain for the political left.”
This shutdown has exposed what many Americans have long understood to be true: Billionaires have used the power that comes with their extreme wealth to capture our government and bend it toward a single purpose, enriching themselves at everyone else’s expense. And if Democrats won’t confront that reality now, when will they?
The pattern extends beyond our borders: The Trump administration is deploying at least $20 billion in taxpayer money to bail out Argentina—not for any strategic interest, but to rescue hedge fund billionaires who bet on the country’s far-right president and now need an escape hatch for their investments before the economy collapses.
The American people have had enough. Recent polling from battleground congressional districts shows that 73 percent of likely voters support raising taxes on billionaires, with 53 percent supporting it strongly. Support is even higher among independents, and higher still among Democratic primary voters, the base that Democrats desperately need to reinvigorate if they want to remain politically relevant.
The public gets it—and they want their elected officials to do something about it.
A growing number of Democrats are trying. In September, the top Democrat on the Senate’s tax-writing committee, Ron Wyden, along with 20 co-sponsors, reintroduced the Billionaires Income Tax Act, legislation designed to ensure billionaires pay their fair share in taxes every year, just like Americans who work for a living already do. Progressive leaders like Senator Bernie Sanders, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, among others, have also championed the need to tax the ultrawealthy.
But at a time when Americans are living through the painful consequences of a government bought and paid for by the ultrawealthy, the Democratic Party and its leaders need to offer voters a unified, forward-looking agenda that actually fights back against this entrenched power.
Granted, the Democrats are out of power, so right now, they can’t do much. But as they make their case heading into 2026 and 2028, asking the voters to return them to power, they need to be talking about a wealth tax like the 5 percent annual tax on people with $50 million or more in wealth and a 10 percent annual tax on people with $250 million or more. Independent scorekeepers have found that such an approach would raise $6.8 trillion in the first 10 years, slow the emergence of new billionaires, and reduce the total share of wealth controlled by billionaires.
This isn’t just about raising revenue to invest in our families and communities. It’s also about breaking the cycle we are currently living through: billionaires using their wealth to buy political power, then using that political power to enrich themselves further while dismantling public programs that help everyone else, thus making them more dependent on billionaire-run services.
Democrats have a choice. They can continue playing defense while billionaires systematically dismantle our economy and democracy to enrich themselves or go on offense with a message the country is ready to hear: If you elect us, we’re going to tax extreme wealth to return power to the people.
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