Name: Bernie vs. the billionaires | Today, Explained
Uploaded: 2026-03-14T16:31:59.000Z
Duration: 21 min 43 s
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Hi, and welcome to Today Explained Saturday.

This week, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.

Adverbs of degree

Senator Bernie Sanders has just introduced his Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair share Act, a 5% annual wealth tax on anyone making more than a billion dollars.

Now, that would be roughly 930ish people.

And of course, it includes some big names.

Someone like Elon Musk would pay up to $40 billion under the law.

Someone like Mark Zuckerberg, about 11 billion.

But Senator Sanders said it would fund something important.

Up to $3,000 in direct payments for anyone living in a household that makes less than $150,000.

That means up to $12,000 for a family of four.

Now, this bill has little chance of becoming law.

Donald Trump would almost certainly veto it, and it's a hard chance it would even get through Congress.

But I still think it's important because it speaks to something that's been growing among the American public and a signal that Senator Sanders is setting when it comes to the 2026 elections and, of course, the 2028 presidential election.

So I wanted to ask Senator Sanders how this bill would actually work.

But since I had him on the line, I also wanted to ask about some other topics that have been in the news, like AI and the future of work.

His recent calls for a moratorium on building data centers and.

And of course, the US Israeli strikes on Iran.

But we had a little bit of trouble connecting when we first got on the line, which got me a peek at that classic Bernie humor.

Has anyone ever played a game with you and God?

I know that it's limited, so I want to jump right into it.

Most Democrats have condemned the US Surrealist strikes in Iran, but Donald Trump is blowing ahead.

Obviously, Congressman Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie's War Powers Resolution failed to pass the House, meaning any chance of congressional action to rein in Trump seems less and less likely by the day.

If you're an American who doesn't support this war, as many do seem to not, is there any recourse coming from Congress?

Well, I think what we have got to do is pull the financial plug here.

I think what we have got to do, do our best in saying, is that not only is this war unconstitutional, not only is it illegal when we have so many strong domestic needs in terms of housing and health care and Education.

We're going to be just throwing tens of billions of dollars into another endless war.

So I think taking a look at how we finance wars is one of the areas that we've got to move to.

But bottom line is we've got to do everything that we can to stop Trump's reckless foreign policy, which is not only unconstitutional, not having gone to Congress, it is in violation of international law and will lead, in my view, to international anarchy.

Anybody will be attacking anybody for any reason.

I want to ask about that funding piece, because that was what I plan to follow up with.

Some Democrats have kind of gone back and forth about whether they should continue funding the war even as they vocalize disagreement, some saying that we're already in it and so minus, well, support military action, others have kind of hedged.

You don't think Democrats should be funding this war if they're going to call it reckless and illegal?

Obviously, I mean, you're not all your colleagues agree with that.

You know, if you think the war is unnecessary, it's illegal, it's unconstitutional, why would you continue to fund it?

You're just making, you know, giving Trump the ammunition, so to speak, that he needs to continue.

I guess I was just asking because it did not seem kind of universal from the caucus.

I also wanted to ask about a wealth test.

You and Congressman Khanna introduced this bill that would have a 5% annual tax on wealth for anyone making over $1 billion.

And importantly, this is a wealth tax, not an income tax.

So things like assets and stock accumulation are also in play.

Well, I think we wanted to make very clear that today we have more income and wealth inequality than we've ever had in the history.

Nickels and dimes compared to where we are right now.

We're living in a moment where the top 1% owns more wealth than the bottom 93%, where one man, Elon Musk, owns more wealth than the bottom 53% of American households, where while 60% of our people are living paycheck to paycheck, the billionaire class has seen its wealth increase by a trillion and a half dollars since Trump was elected.

So I think the point is that at a time of so much Inequality, We've gotta ask the wealthiest people to stop paying their fair share of taxes.

I personally think starting off at a billion dollars is the appropriate way to go.

I mean, the goal of the revenue is to send $3,000 checks to every American in a household making under 150k.

Should I see this as a means of funding a kind of universal basic income?

It says that at a time when the very richest people are becoming much, much richer, while ordinary Americans today are struggling to put food on the table or pay for childcare or pay for health care, the working class of this country needs immediate help.

And that's, by the way, just the one year provision.

$3,000 for every man, woman and child in a family of under 150,000.

But on top of that, we make massive investments every year in childcare, in housing, in education, in health care, in addressing the basic needs of working class Americans.

And yet, everything being equal, our kids will have a lower standard of living than we will.

All of our people should have a decent standard of living.

And we've got to address the massive level of income and wealth inequality to do that.

I definitely want to underscore, I definitely hear the importance of underscoring income inequality and the wealth disparity.

But France tried a wealth tax and repealed it.

the European countries that have gone back have almost universally said that it was because capital left or evasion meant that they did not see the necessary revenue returns.

Well, I think we need to enact that legislation and then we need a political movement to make sure that it is implemented.

One of the things said that, I mean, that's a pretty high standard.

Well, one of the things that is really troubling to me is what you are saying is, look, even if the American people want it, these guys will evade it one way or another.

Other countries have repealed the wealth tax because of that exact problem.

I was out in California a few weeks ago, they're dealing with a state wealth tax.

And the issue there is that 15 million people, including many in California and Vermont, have been thrown off the health care they have in order to give a trillion dollars in tax breaks of the 1% and with the 1% are saying is, you want us to pay more in taxes so the working class people and children will have health care.

Well, if you pass that, you know what we're going to do?

We're going to move to Texas, we're going to move to Florida, because you know why?

So your choice is either you take cuts in health care, do away with health care, or we take away your jaw.

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Bernie vs. the billionaires | Today, Explained

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