Bernie Sanders promotes wealth tax as debate heats up
Bernie Sanders supports a wealth tax, but Congress remains unmoved. Meanwhile, polls show that many Americans support taxing billionaires.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says the struggle is real, but it’s not your fault.
In a May 7 interview on comedian Ilana Glazer’s “It’s Open” podcast, New York Democrat Ocasio-Cortez, known as AOC, said the existence of billions of dollars is more of a systemic failure than an accomplishment.
“It’s impossible to make a billion dollars,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “That’s not all you can earn. You can have market power. You can break the rules. You can do all sorts of things. You can abuse labor laws. You can pay people less than they’re worth. But that’s not all you can earn.”
Rather than internalizing the conditions created by extreme income inequality, Ocasio-Cortez said there is a point at which wealth accumulation becomes passive income.
“And you didn’t earn it, so you have to create a myth that you earned it,” the New York Democrat added.
Concentration of wealth at historical level
Ocasio-Cortez’s comments come as the concentration of wealth in the United States reaches historic levels. The richest 1% of Americans controlled 31.7% of the nation’s wealth in the third quarter of 2025, the highest share since records began in 1989, according to Federal Reserve data cited by Forbes.
This imbalance causes many people to internalize economic hardship as a personal failure rather than a systemic problem, she said.
“As a result, we’ve kind of internalized this moral system,” the progressive Democrat said. “The people at the top are smarter, better, and more sophisticated. Therefore, the people at the bottom are less educated and lazy.”
Can you think of a next step?
The remarks came amid questions surrounding Ocasio-Cortez’s political future heading into 2026. Asked by Democratic strategist David Axelrod whether she was running for president or the Senate, the progressive congresswoman didn’t bite, saying her only ambition was to “change this country.”
