A Wealth Tax Just Won't Cut It

Breaking up monopolies, taxing billionaires, all good. All too little.

The Right Had a Plan. We Need One Too.

This mornin’ the New York Times published a story that should make every progressive in America sick to their stomach. Not because of what it said about climate change. Because of what it said about how power actually works in this country.

Four people. That’s what it took. Four conservative operatives spent the Biden years, the years we were supposedly winning, quietly building the legal and regulatory and political infrastructure to kill the federal government’s ability to fight climate change. Russell Vought. Jeffrey Clark. Mandy Gunasekara. Jonathan Brightbill. They drafted executive orders. They got scientists to write white papers for them. They got Heritage Foundation money. They built the whole thing in secret so nobody could stop them before it was done. And now they’re about to revoke the endangerment finding, which is the scientific determination that has been the foundation of every federal climate regulation since 2009. Myron Ebell, a guy who’s been attacking climate science for damn near three decades, told the Times they were “pretty close to total victory.”

Total victory. His words. And he’s not wrong.

This isn’t the normal back-and-forth when administrations change hands. They didn’t tweak the rules. They didn’t roll back a regulation or two. They removed the foundation the rules were built on. Any future administration that wants to regulate greenhouse gases now has to start from scratch. From nothing.

And while these four were carefully engineering that demolition over the course of years, China was engineering the future. China is producing the world’s solar panels. China is building the world’s green energy infrastructure. China is deploying the machinery and technology and knowledge that will power the next century and make them very, very wealthy and very, very powerful doing it. Now I’m not suggesting the Chinese don’t deserve this or haven’t earned it. But I am suggesting that the United States has a lot to offer. The people of this nation have a lot to offer in our hearts and in our minds and even in our backs. And the most depressing, most frustrating element of what Trump and his people are doing is that they are kneecapping America’s future.

People love to talk about generational harm when it comes to the national debt. And the debt is bad, I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But the generational harm that we’re doing right now isn’t just the debt. It’s what we’re building with the debt. We’re building more oil wells. We’re building more drilling. We’re building more financialization. We’re building more bankers. We’re not building more doctors. We’re not building more factories that produce the tools and the components of the future. We are borrowing from our grandchildren to build yesterday.

I don’t want to spend this whole piece talking about what the right is doing. You already know what the right is doing. I want to talk about what we’re not doing. What progressives are missing. Because I think the left has a problem, and I think until we name it honestly we’re going to keep losing to people like Vought and Clark who actually have a plan.

I love Bernie Sanders. Let me just say that. He is the reason I got into politics. My first political job was on the Sanders campaign. I co-founded Brand New Congress and Justice Democrats because of what he started. I am a Bernie Sanders stan and I will be until the day I die.

But.

When I hear Bernie say we need to overturn Citizens United, I need him to finish the plan. Because what does that actually require? Think about it. A constitutional amendment. That means two-thirds of both chambers of Congress. Or a convention of states. That means taking the House and the Senate with supermajorities. That means dealing with a Supreme Court that is openly hostile to everything we believe in, through impeachment or court expansion or just waiting decades for the bench to turn over. These are massive, generational undertakings. And nobody, nobody on our side is building the infrastructure to accomplish any of them.

When Bernie says we need a wealth tax, or Medicare for All, I believe him. I want those things. But saying them at a rally is not a plan. The crowd cheers because the ideas are right. Then everybody goes home and nothing gets built. And I think the honest reason is that Bernie believes the path runs through a mass movement. Something like the civil rights era. Millions of people in the streets forcing the system to change. And maybe that’s part of it, I’m not dismissing that. But it can’t be the only theory of change, because it hasn’t materialized at the scale we need, and the clock is ticking hard.

Now look at what the right just did. Four people. A plan. Some Heritage Foundation money. They built their demolition infrastructure during the years they were out of power so it was ready on day one when they got back in. No mass movement. No millions in the streets. Just a specific goal, a specific mechanism, and the discipline to execute over sixteen years.

Build a wall. Kill the endangerment finding. Cut regulations. Round up Black and brown folks. Drill, baby, drill. These are terrible ideas. But they share something in common. They are simple. The mechanism is obvious. You can see how you get from A to B.

Overturn Citizens United is not that. Tax the rich is not that. They’re bumper stickers with no engine under the hood. And the people saying them, people I love and respect, have to know that.

Even if we solved the mechanism problem. Even if we got the supermajority and passed the amendment and taxed every billionaire in America. The progressive framework still has a massive hole in it.

Take healthcare. The progressive answer is Medicare for All. Tax the rich, take that money, pump it into the healthcare system so everybody’s covered. And I support Medicare for All, let me be clear about that. But the healthcare system we’d be pumping that money into already gets $6 trillion a year. Six trillion dollars. And what are we getting for it? We have fewer hospitals per capita than we did in the 1970s. We pay the highest drug prices on earth for medicines that our own tax dollars helped develop. Insurance companies deny 30% of claims as routine business practice, just as a matter of course, just Tuesday for them. This is not a spending problem. The system is corrupted and inefficient and producing god-awful results for what it costs. You know what happens when you pump more money into a broken machine? The machine’s owners get richer. That’s it. You don’t fix a rigged system by feeding it more cash. You just make the rig more profitable.

That’s true across the entire economy. Education. Housing. Energy. Broadband. All of it. The progressive instinct is always the same. Tax the bad guys, then spend more on the broken system. But the systems are broken because they’ve been captured by the people extracting wealth from them. More spending without structural change is just giving the arsonist a nicer fire truck.

So the right wants to tear everything down. The mainstream left wants to pump more money into the wreckage. And almost nobody is proposing to build something that actually works.

But there’s another path. And it’s not some fantasy I cooked up. We’ve walked it before.

America should build things again, and we the people should own what we build.

Not regulate the monopolies. Not break them into little pieces and hope the little pieces behave better. Not tax their profits and funnel the revenue back through the same captured institutions that got us here. Build the public competitor. At scale. A public energy company that competes with the fossil fuel giants by producing and selling clean energy. A public AI lab so the most transformative technology in human history isn’t owned by three billionaires in Silicon Valley. Public pharmaceutical manufacturing so we stop paying the highest prices in the world for drugs our tax dollars developed. Public broadband. Public hospitals that actually serve their communities instead of extracting from them.

Now some people hear public competition and think I mean co-ops and farmer’s markets going up against Amazon. I don’t. I mean the full weight and scale of the United States government entering markets where private monopolies have failed the public. There is utility in scale. There is utility in having massive, vertically integrated operations. The question isn’t whether those things should exist. The question is who owns them. We don’t let Elon Musk own a nuclear weapon. We treat water as a public utility. But Musk is shooting rockets into space and becoming the richest human being in the history of the species doing it, all on government contracts and government subsidies and government IP and government infrastructure. Why isn’t NASA doing that and keeping the upside for the American people? Why are we subsidizing this man’s empire and getting nothing in return except the privilege of watching him buy the government with our money?

And some people ask me, how, Corbin, how do we do it ourselves? Well, we’ve done it before. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation created companies during and after World War II. Government-owned and government-operated. Government-owned and contractor-operated. GoCo and GoGo. We had a Manhattan Project. We had an Arsenal of Democracy. We built those things because we had something to overcome. And we have something to overcome right now. What we have to overcome is our collapse. Our relegation to uselessness for the world. Our slide into a country whose only utility to the planet is that we haven’t bombed them yet.

There are progressives running for office right now who I believe in. Fighters. Dan Osborn in Nebraska, a union leader and Navy vet running as an independent against a billionaire senator. He led the Kellogg’s strike. He came within seven points in a state Trump won by twenty. Graham Platner in Maine, a Marine combat vet and oyster farmer taking on Susan Collins, endorsed by Bernie, leading in the polls. James Talarico in Texas, a former teacher running for Senate, $13 million raised, 98% small donors, zero corporate PAC money. Justin Pearson in Tennessee, one of the Tennessee Three, expelled from the state house for protesting gun violence, put right back by his community, now running for Congress at 30 years old. I want every one of them to win.

But I’m going to be honest with you, and I think you deserve that. Most of them are still running the traditional progressive playbook. Tax the billionaires. Fight corporate greed. Expand the safety net. Oppose the bad guys. And all of that matters, all of it is necessary, I’m not knocking any of it. But taxing the billionaires and pumping that money back through broken, captured systems doesn’t build a country that works. It makes the extraction slightly less brutal for a while, until the next administration comes in and reverses everything.

What’s missing is the construction plan. The vision that says we don’t just fight the monopolies, we build the public alternative that makes them irrelevant. We don’t just tax Elon Musk, we build something that competes his market power away. We don’t just regulate the drug companies, we manufacture the drugs ourselves and sell them at cost. We can decide to leap towards the Jetsons instead of the Flintstones. We don’t have to choose the Thanos model where we burn the thing to the ground and let the survivors fight over the destroyed spoils.

The person who most clearly understands this right now is my friend and former colleague Saikat Chakrabarti. Saikat helped me recruit AOC. He was her chief of staff. He was the architect of the Green New Deal. And now he’s building something called Mission for America, which is a framework for exactly the kind of public-scale construction I’ve been talking about. Of all the people I know in progressive politics, Saikat is the one who gets it. Who understands that the progressive movement doesn’t just need better candidates or louder messaging. It needs a fundamentally different theory of how you build economic power for the public. Not how you redistribute crumbs from the billionaire’s table. How you build your own damn table.

But Saikat can’t do this alone. AOC and Bernie can’t do it alone. I sure as hell can’t do it alone. What we need is for the fighters already in the ring, the Osborns and the Platners and the Talaricos and the Pearsons, to connect their fight to this bigger vision. To go beyond tax the rich and start saying build the alternative. To understand that the answer to a $6 trillion healthcare system that doesn’t deliver isn’t more money, it’s a public competitor that actually delivers care. If that sounds like the Green New Deal, good. Because it is. It always was. We just need more people willing to say it and then do the work to make it real.

The right built their demolition plan during the Biden years. While Democrats were celebrating the biggest climate law in history, four operatives in a rowhouse near the Capitol were drafting the executive orders to destroy it all. They were building while we were taking victory laps.

We have to do the same thing in reverse. Right now. The Trump years are our building years. Not just protests, though protest has its place. Building the actual policy infrastructure and candidate pipeline and public enterprise models that are ready to go when the window opens.

The right had a construction plan for demolition. We need a construction plan for construction. Simple enough to explain. Big enough to matter. And ready when the moment comes.

You either built the thing already or you didn’t. It’s time to build ours.

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