Bernie SandersVerified account

While U.S. taxpayers are subsidizing the starvation wages at Walmart, our nation’s largest private employer, the Walton family has made over $20 billion during the pandemic and now has a net worth of over $200 billion.

While 40 million Americans face eviction, Elon Musk has nearly tripled his wealth over the past four months and now has a net worth of more than $70 billion.

While millions of Americans are lining up at emergency food banks because they don’t have enough money to put food on the table, Mark Zuckerberg the founder of Facebook has increased his wealth by more than $37 billion during the pandemic and is now worth over $90 billion.

At a time of massive wealth and income inequality, when so many our people are hurting, it is morally obscene for billionaires to use a global pandemic as an opportunity to make outrageous profits.

If we taxed 60% of the windfall gains 467 billionaires made from March 18th until August 3rd we could raise over $420 billion. That’s enough revenue to allow Medicare to pay all of the out-of-pocket health care expenses for everyone in America over the next 12 months.

Yes, by taxing 60% of the wealth gains made by just 467 billionaires during this pandemic, we could guarantee health care as a right for an entire year. And billionaires would still be able to pocket over $310 billion in gains during the worst downturn since the Great Depression.

In my view, we can no longer tolerate the three wealthiest people in America owning more wealth than the bottom 50 percent, while over 30 million Americans have lost their jobs and 92 million people are either uninsured or under-insured.

We have a choice to make. We can continue to allow the very rich to get much richer while everyone else gets poorer and poorer. Or we can tax the winnings a handful of billionaires made during the pandemic to improve the health and well-being of tens of millions of Americans.