We’re Making ‘Tax the Rich’ More Than a Slogan

“Workers Over Billionaires” was the slogan on Labor Day. It should be the slogan every day.

By Max Page, Labor Notes

Taxing the rich should bring a smile to your face. It certainly brings one to mine.

Here’s what passing the Fair Share Amendment in Massachusetts allowed us to do, in just the first years since its passage in 2022: Offer free community college tuition to every resident (bringing a 40 percent increase in enrollment), free school meals for every student, free regional buses, a multi-billion-dollar capital program for public higher education and public vocational high schools. And we’ve been able to invest in literacy programs, and expand access to affordable childcare and early education.

We did it by making the rich pay a small additional tax (4 cents on every dollar) on their income above a million dollars a year. That tax affects just 25,000 households in a state of 8 million, less than one percent of the state’s residents.

Because the rich are so very rich, that small surtax produced $3 billion this past year, all dedicated to public education and transportation.

Fair Share changed our state constitution, so it’s there every year, and it’s not going away, much to the chagrin of the billionaire class.

But if they were honest (which they are not) the rich would admit they don’t even feel it. Beyond the fact that $100 million to them is like pennies you might have sucked up into your vacuum cleaner, the uber-rich in Massachusetts just got their money back: the 1% in Massachusetts received a $3.3 billion tax cut from Trump and the Republican Congress this year as part of the Big Ugly Bill—paid for by stealing health care from the working poor.

“Workers Over Billionaires” was the slogan on Labor Day. It should be the slogan every day. The coalition of Democrats and Republicans who perpetuated a politics of austerity, the undermining of unions, and attacks on the very idea of government have paved the path to full-blown authoritarianism. It is an unholy—but unsurprising—alliance of the 1%-of-the-1% who own much of the wealth in this nation, and the authoritarians who find democracy and unions an inconvenient obstacle to their power and rapacious goals.

We are reaping what mainstream politics sowed. The labor movement has to plant new seeds.

FIFTY-STATE CAMPAIGN

One row to plant is a 50-state campaign to tax the very rich, to fund our public schools and colleges, protect health care, make public transportation efficient and free, and most importantly, expand our vision of what is possible. Our states need the money. They needed it before, and with the federal attacks on state budgets, we need it more than ever.

Taxing the rich will be popular among working people—it has always been popular—but it’ll be even more popular as the reality of what this regime is doing to people’s health care and public schools becomes clearer. This year is terrible; next year, when the Medicaid cuts hit, it will be catastrophic.