IT Blog

Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) introduced a new bill Thursday that would slap a one-time 60% tax on the riches U.S. billionaires, many of them tech billionaires, have accumulated after the COVID-19 pandemic hit the U.S. in mid-March.

If the bill, called the Make Billionaires Pay Act, was signed into law, Jeff Bezos would owe Uncle Sam $42.6 billion on the whopping $71 billion in wealth he’s accumulated since mid-March. Mark Zuckerberg would owe $22.8 billion on the $38 billion he’s made. Elon Musk would owe $27.6 billion on his $46 billion in gains.

In all, the bill would tax 467 of the country’s 650 billionaires, which the bill’s signatories say have cumulatively become $732 billion richer during the pandemic. It would raise $422 billion to pay for the “out-of-pocket medical expenses of all the uninsured and the under-insured Medicare beneficiaries over the next 12 months,” Sanders’s office says.

Sounds good in principle, and it certainly satisfies the populist urges of…