- Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna introduced the wealth tax act to levy 5% annually on billionaires.
- Revenue from the tax would fund $3,000 direct checks for millions of eligible American households.
- The proposal targets accumulated net worth rather than income to fund healthcare, housing, and education.
(UNITED STATES) — Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Ro Khanna introduced new legislation on March 2, 2026, proposing a 5% annual billionaire wealth tax and directing part of the proceeds to $3, 000 checks for many Americans.
Sanders, an independent from Vermont, and Khanna, a Democrat from California, named the measure the “Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share Act.” Their proposal levies an annual tax on the net worth of the country’s wealthiest people, rather than on yearly income.
Sponsors framed the plan as a fairness measure that aims to raise large sums from ultra-wealthy households and use the money for direct payments and domestic priorities. They also cast it as an alternative to cutting public benefits and as a way to generate federal revenue.
The legislation arrives as Democrats and Republicans continue to fight over the size of federal safety-net programs and the appropriate tax burden on high earners and large fortunes. Sanders has long argued that billionaires should pay more, and he and Khanna are tying the proposal to a new round of direct checks.
Wealth taxes have repeatedly drawn questions about how to measure fortunes held in both public and private assets, and about how aggressively the government could enforce the annual assessments. Sanders and Khanna presented their bill as a direct attempt to tax accumulated wealth, not wages.
The bill would require Congress to pass it and a president to sign it before any tax could take effect. Nothing in the announcement indicated it has cleared any committee or advanced through either chamber.
Under the proposal, the tax applies only to wealth above a very high net-worth cutoff, and people below that level would owe nothing under the new tax. Backers described it as a levy on the portion of wealth that exceeds the threshold, using net worth as the base.
In practice, a wealth tax depends on annual valuations of what people own, minus what they owe. That means the bill would rely on a system for pricing assets that change value over time, including stock holdings and ownership stakes in private companies.
Supporters argue that taxing net worth targets fortunes that can grow substantially even when billionaires report relatively little taxable income in a given year. Critics of wealth taxes have argued in past debates that valuations can be contested and that the wealthy can shift assets or change residency, though the bill’s backers emphasized enforcement and revenue potential.
Economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman from the University of California at Berkeley analyzed the legislation and provided the revenue projection cited by the sponsors. Saez and Zucman have also been prominent advocates of wealth taxation in academic work and public policy debates.
Sanders and Khanna said the revenue would support a one-time round of direct payments to individuals, with eligibility based on a household-income cutoff. The concept, as described by the sponsors, is to send checks to people in households below the income cap, rather than to everyone regardless of earnings.
They also described the payment plan as a defined, one-time cost funded from the projected revenue of the billionaire wealth tax. Revenue and cost figures in such plans can vary with definitions, compliance assumptions, enforcement capacity, and changes in asset values.
The plan’s direct-payment centerpiece sits alongside a broader list of spending priorities that sponsors said the bill would fund. Sanders and Khanna linked the proposal to health coverage, benefits for seniors, housing production, childcare affordability, and school staffing pay.
One element involves reversing $1.1 trillion in Medicaid and Affordable Care Act cuts from the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” which the sponsors said is estimated to prevent over 50,000 unnecessary deaths. The proposal also calls for expanding Medicare to cover dental, vision, and hearing for seniors.
On housing, the sponsors said the bill would fund efforts to build, rehabilitate, and preserve over 7 million affordable homes. The list also includes a plan to cap childcare costs at 7% of family income.
Sanders and Khanna also said the revenue would support setting a $60,000 minimum annual salary for public school teachers. Another stated priority is expanding Medicaid home health care for seniors and people with disabilities.
Sanders’s press release also highlighted what it described as illustrative, first-year estimated tax bills for several high-profile billionaires. Those examples depend on net-worth calculations that can shift sharply with markets and with how assets are valued.
For Elon Musk, the press release cited $833 billion net worth and said the proposal would generate $42 billion in first-year taxes, leaving ~$792 billion. The figures underscore how a wealth tax can produce very large annual liabilities when a person’s fortune is heavily concentrated in assets that have risen in value.
The same release cited Mark Zuckerberg at $220 billion, with a first-year estimated tax bill of $11 billion. It cited Jeff Bezos at $218 billion, with a first-year estimated tax bill of ~$11 billion.
Those examples also point to the practical questions that wealth taxes raise about liquidity. Many of the richest people hold fortunes largely in shares and company stakes, and an annual tax based on net worth can require paying large sums even if a person has limited cash on hand.
A large share of billionaire wealth can be tied to publicly traded stock, which has visible market prices but can swing sharply within a year. Private-company holdings can be harder to value, because they may not trade frequently and can depend on estimates that differ between appraisers.
The annual nature of the tax also means the bill’s impact could change year to year as markets rise and fall. A person’s taxable net worth could climb quickly in a bull market and drop during downturns, which would affect the annual tax calculation.
Sanders and Khanna argued that limiting the tax to only wealth above the threshold aims to concentrate the new levy on the very top. They also presented the plan as a way to fund broad-based benefits without raising taxes on people below the cutoff.
The bill’s prospects in Congress appear dim in the near term, with passage described as unlikely due to GOP control of Congress. Still, Sanders and Khanna portrayed the proposal as part of a broader push that could shape Democratic priorities ahead of the 2028 election.
The announcement also comes as wealth-tax debates have played out at the state level. Sponsors pointed to debates over a similar 5% wealth tax proposal in California, where some billionaires relocated.
Sanders’s office said bill text, a summary, and an economic analysis are available via Sanders’s Senate office. The economic analysis cited Saez and Zucman as the referenced analysts behind the revenue projection.
