There’s such a lot to command public attention today that it’s been easy to miss the emergence of the Democrats’ primary legislative focus over the past couple of months: remaking American taxes. For instance:

  • Yesterday, the state of Washington’s Democratic-controlled legislature passed and sent to Democratic Gov. Bob Ferguson a bill that creates a 9.9 percent income tax on Washingtonians earning more than a million dollars a year. Ferguson has said he’ll sign it. Currently, the state has an extremely regressive tax structure; the economists at ITEP calculate that the poorest 20 percent of Washington families pay 14 percent of their income to taxes while the wealthiest 1 percent pay just 4 percent. Similar bills have begun to move through the legislatures in other Democratic trifecta states, such as Illinois.
  • Next Monday, each house of the New York state legislature will unveil their proposed budgets, which call for a 0.5 percent raise on the incomes of New Yorkers who make more than $5 million yearly—less than Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s proposal to raise by 2 percent the tax on New Yorkers who make more than $1 million yearly, but still high enough to make the richest and greediest New Yorkers scream.
  • In California, volunteers are collecting signatures to put on November’s ballot a 5 percent one-time wealth tax on the state’s billionaires, while volunteers in San Francisco and Los Angeles are collecting signatures for municipal ballot initiatives that would raise taxes on corporations whose CEOs make either 100 times (in the San Francisco version) or 50 times (in the L.A. version) what their median workers make.
  • In Congress, California Rep. Ro Khanna and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders have introduced a bill that would create a wealth tax on the nation’s billionaires. And in the last few weeks, Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen and New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker have each introduced bills that would reduce taxes on working- and middle-class Americans. Van Hollen’s would end income taxes on anyone with a yearly income under $46,000 or a married couple whose income is under $92,000, while Booker’s would double the standard deduction to $37,500 for individuals and $75,000 for married couples.

In other words, Democrats are beginning en masse to reshape taxes to account for the massive redistribution upward of wealth and income that the nation has experienced since 1980. Research on national tax and accounts data by Parisian-Berkeley trio of economists Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman has documented that the pretax income share of the top 1 percent of Americans has risen from roughly 10 percent in 1980 to 22 percent today. Research from the Federal Reserve and the Paris-Berkeley Three shows that the fortunes of the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans rose from roughly 20 percent of all Americans’ wealth in the 1970s to 32 percent today.

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As to CEO pay, it has risen from about 20 times greater than that of their companies’ median worker in the 1960s to well more than 200 times that today.

And when it comes to billionaires—of whom we have roughly 1,300—today they control between 15 and 20 percent of all Americans’ wealth. Fifty years ago, there were so few American billionaires that they controlled less than 1 percent of the nation’s wealth.

And 50 years ago, we should never forget, Americans could afford to buy homes (the median age of first-time homebuyers was at least a full decade younger than it is today), go to college (at most public colleges and universities, tuition was still either free or nominal), and purchase prescription drugs. In other words, the relationship between an economy dominated by billionaires and an economy of broadly shared prosperity is, in a word, inverse.

Which is why the Democrats’ current tax reform efforts seek to do no more than update our taxes to account for the massive upward redistribution of wealth and income that the nation has experienced over the past half-century. While billionaires (who, The New York Times reported earlier this week, accounted for 19 percent of all the contributions to House, Senate, and presidential campaigns in 2024) are shrieking at the injustice of all this, the public, happily, supports raising taxes on the richest Americans. Indeed, a range of recent polls show that a majority of Republicans favor raising taxes on the rich.

I note, by the way, that in the wake of the state of Washington’s tax hike, Starbucks exec and union-buster Howard Schultz has said he’ll move to low-tax (and correspondingly low levels of public education) Florida, where he’ll join his fellow billionaire refugees from other blue states on private islands and in well-defended enclaves where they won’t have to suffer the indignity of interaction with normal Americans (excepting, of course, their servants).

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Harold Meyerson is editor at large of The American Prospect.