On the Wednesday, March 25, 2026, episode of The Excerpt podcast:America's wealth gap is exploding, with the top 0.1% pulling far ahead. As calls for a wealth tax grow louder, USA TODAY Personal Finance Reporter Daniel de Visé joins The Excerpt to break down what taxing the super‑rich could mean for the economy and for everyday Americans.
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it.This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Dana Taylor:
Income inequality in the US is surging, reminiscent of the gilded age according to inequality.org, Project of the Institute for Policy Studies. According to the Congressional Budget Office between 1979 and 2021, the average income of the top 0.1% of households grew almost 27 times as fast as the bottom 20%, which brings me to a question being asked across the country today, should the very rich be subject to a special tax?
Hello and welcome to USA TODAY's The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Wednesday, March 25th, 2026. Joining me to discuss the possibility of a wealth tax is USA TODAY Personal Finance Reporter Daniel de Vise. It's so good to have you back on, Daniel.
Daniel de Visé:
Happy to be here.
Dana Taylor:
Daniel, give me an overview of how we got here. What spurred this national conversation about a wealth tax?
Daniel de Visé:
Well, we have progressive taxation in this country, which means people who earn more generally pay a higher amount of their earnings as tax at higher levels of earnings. But right now, compared with 40 or 50 or 60 years ago, the top tax rate, the rate you pay on the top, top income is lower than it's been in the past. Even during the Clinton years and in the '90s, there was a significantly higher marginal tax rate for people, the top earners than there is now.
President Trumphas made a big deal out of trying to push down tax rates, and his critics would say he's been especially pushing down tax rates for high earners. And then you have this whole world of capital gains, of gains on stocks basically. And the taxes on those are lower. And if you keep them in sort of tax favored accounts, as wealthy people do, you pay no taxes on them and you could potentially pass them to your heirs without any taxes being paid on them. So there is this sort of perpetuation of wealth. And yeah, it's true, the concentration of money among sort of billionaires now is as high as it's been probably in a hundred years.
Dana Taylor:
Okay. Let's dig into this starting with California. What's happening there?
Daniel de Visé:
There's a billionaire tax and it's out there. I mean, there's a bunch of wealth taxes going on around the country, more in blue states. But this is out there. It's an outlier. It would raise $100 billion supposedly through a one time 5% tax on the assets of billionaires. So what that means is if you're a suburban household and you have maybe a million dollars in net worth, that's not who's being taxed here, but just to give you an idea, you'd pay 50,000 bucks as a one-time tax.
Obviously, if that happened in my suburb in Maryland, all hell would break loose, pardon the French. But that's what this billionaire tax is. There's 200 billionaires apparently. Well, there's fewer than that now because a few of them have said they're leaving, but there were 200 billionaires and each of them would pay a one time 5% tax. It's a ballot measure, so it has to go through the process of collecting signatures. They're not all collected yet. If they do get, I think it's 900,000 signatures, it'll go on the ballot in November.
Dana Taylor:
Washington Governor Bob Ferguson has a wealth tax bill on his desk ready to be signed into law right now. What's in that bill, Daniel?
Daniel de Visé:
So Washington State up to now does not have an income tax. So it's one of those states where you don't pay state income tax. But because of the governor was talking about the idea of rising wealth inequality in that state and elsewhere. So to sort of even the playing field, lawmakers there approved, it's about a 10%, 9.9% tax. This would be on income. So not on all of the assets of these wealthy people. It's on income over a million dollars. And you'll see a pattern in these wealth taxes in other states too, that generally, forget California for a minute. In other places, it's targeted income over a million dollars like for a household. So that means if you're a couple of high school teachers who each earn $100,000, you'd be nowhere near this. So it's half a percent of people in Washington state would pay about a 10% tax just on the portion of their income that's over a million dollars.
Dana Taylor:
One of New York mayors, Zohran Mamdani's signature pieces of proposed legislation is a wealth tax. What's the status of that bill?
Daniel de Visé:
Mamdani campaigned on the idea of taxing the wealthiest New Yorkers. This would again be those earning more than a million dollars a year in income and raising the tax ... There's already a tax on that income for New Yorkers, but raising it by two percentage points up to 5.9%. He said it would raise, I think, $4 billion a year. I think there's a budget deficit going on in New York.
The status of that is it hasn't happened yet. There's negotiations going on between Mamdani, who is of course now the mayor and the legislature in New York, which is generally, I think, a blue state, but a lot of the people in that legislature don't necessarily like the idea of taxing wealthy New Yorkers. There's this perpetual fear, and this goes across all of these wealth tax ideas that it will chase away the wealthy people that they will simply move rather than pay the tax.
Dana Taylor:
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A wealth tax on income over a million was passed in Massachusetts in 2022. How many households were impacted there, Daniel, and what did the state use that money for?
Daniel de Visé:
I don't know the exact number. I'm going to guess it's probably 1% or less of the people who live in Massachusetts will be paying that 4% sur tax on income over a million dollars. That's a very wealthy state, but even so, very few people earn that much. It has brought in, I believe, about $6 billion, and this is important. There's not been much evidence of people leaving Massachusetts rather than pay that tax. This is important. I've looked at a lot of research into, do people flee ahead of a wealth tax? And it's kind of a newish area, but most of the research seems to suggest that wealthy people don't generally move because of a marginal increase in their taxes. They'll move for all sorts of reasons. And in California, this might be different because that tax is really an outlier. It's a big tax. But generally speaking, the research seems to show that wealthy people don't move just because you raise their taxes a little bit.
Dana Taylor:
As you know, Warren Buffett is well known for his advocacy of progressive taxation. What is the Buffett rule?
Daniel de Visé:
The Buffett rule, which I think President Obama actually put this forward, this would be that, again, it's this million dollar threshold of income that if you're earning more than that in a year, that you should be paying at least 30% of your income in federal taxes, which is way more than most people at that level pay. And so Warren Buffett's idea was that in effect, wealthy people aren't taxed at the same rate as just regular working people. And the reason gets into, again, investment income, which tends to be taxed at a lower rate, if at all. If you have millions of dollars in investments in some sort of tax favored like an IRA or something, you might pay very little taxes on those while they sit in those accounts.
Dana Taylor:
When he was running for the Democratic nomination for president, Senator Bernie Sanders advocated for wealth tax. Has any federal plan to tax the wealthy made any headway in Congress?
Daniel de Visé:
Well, I should note that Senator Sanders is in favor of the California wealth tax, and that's a divider because California's own governor, Gavin Newsom, who's a Democrat, is very much opposed to this billionaire tax. Sanders is in favor of it. It comes out of the unions in California. And typically, this is the sort of proposal that if Senator Senators puts it forward, not many people will support it. It certainly wouldn't pass right now in the current Congress, which is controlled by Republicans, but even a lot of Democrats are sort of wary of these things. I will say though that the public generally supports the idea of a wealth tax.
There was a poll done on this California billionaire tax, and I think about 50% of people polled who are voters in California said they support the idea of this massive tax on billionaires, and something like 28, 29% said they opposed it. Likewise, Gallup has found that about 12% of the citizenry thinks that rich people pay too much taxes already. So most people think they don't pay enough or pay the right amount.
Dana Taylor:
Daniel, what do critics of such a tax say?
Daniel de Visé:
The recurring criticism of all of these wealth taxes is that they will drive away the wealthy people. In other words, if Washington State or California or Massachusetts or New York, if any of those places taxes its wealthiest residents, those people who have means will simply move away. They'll move to Florida, they'll move to Texas rather than pay the tax.
Now, again, research shows it doesn't look like that many people actually do it, but it is harder for a state to get away with this sort of tax because if you're a state like California and you're asking your billionaires, Larry Page, Sergio Brin, to hand over 5% of their assets, there are 49 other states that California is competing with. And some of these folks, including those two guys, have indicated they will move. They can move. They have tons of money rather than pay this big, big one-time tax, they'll just move away. So that's the danger. And it'll be real interesting to see how it plays out if this California measure becomes law because it is an outlier and it's by far the most extreme wealth tax that's been yet proposed.
Dana Taylor:
What will you be watching for next on the wealth tax front?
Daniel de Visé:
Well, the interesting question is, first of all, whether this California measure gets anywhere, a lot of money is being spent against it by some very wealthy people, whether it gets on the ballot at all, whether a massive, massive sort of publicity campaign causes it to fall at the polls. And then if it becomes law, then to watch and see whether these 200 billionaires in California actually move. This will be the biggest test that we've had of this idea of a wealth tax. That's the big question.
Dana Taylor:
I wouldn't mind having these problems. Daniel de Vise is a personal finance reporter for USA TODAY. Thank you so much, Daniel.
Daniel de Visé:
Thank you for having me.
Dana Taylor:
Thanks to our senior producer, Kaely Monahan for her production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to podcasts@usatoday.com. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. I'll be back tomorrow morning with another episode of USA TODAY's The Excerpt.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY:America's wealth gap is exploding. Should the rich pay more? | The Excerpt