When Elizabeth Warren introduced the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act in 2019, it covered the top 0.05% of American households. Seven years later, the reintroduced version — backed by Rep. Ro Khanna of California and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont — covers 260,000 households and the top 0.15% of earners. The target population tripled without anyone voting on anything.
That's not a coincidence. That's the plan.
What's being called a "wealth tax" is not a revenue tool. It is a redistribution mechanism — the policy instrument of socialist economics, designed to gradually erode concentrated private wealth until it no longer exists. Warren, Sanders, and Khanna aren't hiding this. Sanders has called himself a democratic socialist for his entire career. The stated goal of a wealth tax is not to fund government services. It is to make large accumulations of private wealth structurally impossible. The threshold is wherever they need it to be on the day they need it there.
On July 3rd, Khanna made the quiet part loud on his Substack. His words: "The tax should not stop at billionaires, it must reach centimillionaires." The new floor is $50 million.
Here's what House Bill 8085 actually does. A 2% annual federal levy on wealth above $50 million, with a provision that automatically doubles the top rate to 6%. Not income. Wealth. Every asset you own, valued and taxed annually, with a 30% annual IRS audit requirement baked in for affected taxpayers. And if you're thinking about leaving: a 40% exit tax on net worth above $50 million.
That departure penalty deserves its own moment. Under this bill, if you have built $55 million in assets and decide you want to live in another country, the federal government takes 40% of everything you own above $50 million before you go. That is not a tax provision. That is a border. It is the mechanism authoritarian governments use to trap capital — the acknowledgment, written directly into law, that wealthy Americans will try to leave and must be financially penalized for doing so. When a government charges you 40% of your assets to exercise your right to move, it has declared itself a co-owner of what you built.
The bill claims it would generate $4.4 trillion in revenue. That number assumes wealthy Americans will sit perfectly still while the government takes 2% to 6% of everything they own every year. Europe ran this experiment. France imposed its wealth tax and watched an estimated 10,000 wealthy residents leave in a single year. Sweden abolished its wealth tax in 2007. Germany's was ruled unconstitutional. When Denmark finally ended its wealth tax, taxable assets actually increased — because wealthy individuals stopped hiding them. The countries that tried this found out what the revenue projections always miss: capital moves. The IRS — the same agency that can't process paper returns in under six months — would also need to suddenly develop the capacity to conduct 30% annual audits of 260,000 complex multi-asset estates. That has never happened in the history of the agency.
The bill also doesn't ask whether your wealth is liquid. A farmer with $60 million in land, a family business owner with $55 million in equity, a restaurant chain owner who built value over thirty years — none of these people have a vault to tax. They would be required to sell assets every year to pay the annual bill. That forced liquidation is not an incidental design flaw. It is the mechanism. Selling family farms and small businesses to meet annual wealth levies is how concentrated ownership gets consolidated into the hands of institutions large enough to absorb the cost.
Former Microsoft executive Steven Sinofsky spotted the shift immediately. "Just like that, no longer a billionaires tax," he wrote. He's right. But this was always where it was going.
Warren's original bill targeted billionaires — approximately 700 people. Biden's 2022 Billionaire Minimum Income Tax targeted households worth $100 million. Khanna's version reaches $50 million. Gavin Newsom floated a state-level version at $100 million before quietly scrubbing it. A separate California ballot measure targeting the state's roughly 250 billionaires is already in circulation. The pattern across every version is identical: propose a threshold that sounds like it only hits the mega-rich, wait for it to normalize, then move the line.
How far does the line move? Norway's wealth tax starts at $160,000. The Netherlands starts at €57,000. Those are not estates. Those are paid-off mortgages and retirement accounts. That is the endpoint of this trajectory — not this year, not next year, but the direction has never pointed anywhere else.
For what it's worth: Ro Khanna lives in a $6 million Washington home, his financial disclosure documents run 333 pages, and three private golf club memberships are held in trust for his children. The man proposing to audit other people's wealth has a relationship with wealth that would keep forensic accountants busy for a quarter.
Proposition 13 passed in California in 1978 because voters understood something simple: a tax on someone else's property eventually becomes a tax on your property. Warren said it was about billionaires. Khanna just moved the floor from $1 billion to $50 million in a single Substack post. He's already told you it doesn't stop there.
The threshold goes in one direction. The rate goes in another. And the exits get more expensive the longer you wait — which is exactly what that 40% departure tax is designed to guarantee.