First, they came for the billionaires; then for the millionaires; then, the homeowners. Sound incredible? In California, in Rhode Island, and in New York City, they already are. The policy of redistribution is on the march.
In California, a billionaire tax proposal is seeking 875,000 registered-voter signatures by June 24th to get on this November’s ballot. It is already making headlines because if passed by California voters, its one-time (they promise), five-percent tax on net worth over $1 billion would apply to those residing in the state as of January 1, 2026. As currently written, it would also include unrealized gains in its wealth calculation, so individuals could owe on what they don’t own.
Union-backed (by SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West), it’s also governor-opposed (Newsom says “it’s a badly drafted effort and it's already had an outsized impact on this state,"), and despite it being far from being law, it has already spurred a flight among California’s estimated 200 billionaires; among them, Larry Page, Peter Thiel, and Larry Ellison.
Rhode Island’s millionaire tax is also just a proposal. So far. Governor Dan McKee is proposing in his budget to increase the tax on incomes of $1 million or more by three percentage points, raising the new top rate up to 8.99 percent—taking it up to the level of neighboring Massachusetts. McKee’s increase is triple what labor leaders and Rhode Island lawmakers had proposed on incomes above $640,000.
In New York City, Mayor Mamdani’s choice to lead his Office to Protect Tenants is Cea Weaver, a longtime tenant activist who took her activism to extremes. In 2019 social media posts, Weaver said “private property including any kind of especially homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy masquerading as ‘wealth building public policy.’”
None of this is new. Massachusetts approved a 4 percent millionaire tax three years ago, and in its first two years in effect it has netted itself roughly $5.2 billion—well above estimates. California, Connecticut, Maine, New Jersey, and New York, all have versions of millionaire taxes. Washington and Michigan are also eyeing versions of millionaire taxes. And of course, the new democrat socialist mayors in New York (Zohran Mamdani campaigned on taxing millionaires up to 5.9 percent) and Seattle (Katie Wilson) support targeting the rich.
All this is happening in Democratic strongholds: Each of the five states with millionaire taxes currently are completely controlled by Democrats. And it is occurring with increasing frequency and intensity.
No longer were traditional, progressive tax rates, where rates move higher as incomes grow larger, adequate. Surtaxes on millionaires were added. Now progressives’ reach seeks to go further in California: to a 5 percent tax not on income but on an individual’s underlying wealth.
The politics and economics of envy are the answers to progressivism’s profligacy. As liberals become more extreme, their policies become more ambitious, their costs more expensive. It is also the answer to progressivism’s ultimate ambitions.
As Cea Weaver’s unguarded rants against property ownership demonstrate: It is not simply wealth’s amount, but its very existence, that is a “problem” they want to eradicate. To Weaver and those like her, capitalism is an inherently unjust system. The distribution of the products—private property—of this unjust system is also unjust. The only answer is to redistribute it themselves. And that is what they ultimately intend to do.
All these are just incremental steps in the Left’s movement toward redistribution. The quantity may change—from billionaires to millionaires to private property itself—but they all share the same qualitative element. California governor Gavin Newsom’s complaint is not that his state’s leftwing unions want to boil the frog; Newsom’s complaint is that his leftwing unions are turning up the heat so high that the fog will jump out of the pot.
With mayoral victories in New York City and Seattle, the leftward lurch of democratic socialism has inched toward mainstream. In the face of this focal momentum, it is easy to overlook that progressivism’s policies of targeting the rich are even further ahead of its politics. The only difference is that progressivism’s policies have been moving less visibly.
We, therefore, should not be surprised to see these streams of policy and politics crossing and becoming full-fledged redistribution programs in America’s deepest blue enclaves. In these, Horatio Alger’s stories have been replaced by those of Karl Marx.
