(The Epoch Times)—Although California voters rejected the state’s proposed “billionaire’s tax,” at the midterm ballot box, politicians and groups are persisting in efforts to tax savings and investments in the United States.
The sponsors of California’s Proposition 40 have pledged to resurrect it in 2028, while bills to implement a national wealth tax have been introduced in Congress this year by Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), Brendan F. Boyle (D-Pa.) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), with the backing of 45 other federal lawmakers.
State legislatures are also considering wealth tax bills in Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, Rhode Island, and Washington.
Proponents of wealth taxes say the richest Americans often avoid paying income taxes and that wealth taxes targeting the assets of billionaires and multi-millionaires will shift the tax burden more toward those whose wealth is realized as assets rather than income.
Sanders says his “Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share Act” would impose a 5 percent wealth tax on about 1,000 American billionaires, whose collective net worth is estimated at $8.2 trillion, and claims the government would give those dollars to lower-income people.
“The bill would provide a $3,000 direct payment to every man, woman and child in a household making $150,000 or less—$12,000 for a family of four—and use the estimated $4.4 trillion in revenue raised over the next decade to address the most pressing crises facing working families,” Sanders’ website states.
Warren claims her bill, which sets a lower threshold of $50 million in assets, would raise $6.2 trillion over the next decade to pay for universal child care, free community college, and Medicare expansion.
Critics, however, doubt wealth taxes will deliver the payoff promised to average Americans and say they will likely curtail investment and job creation.
“Wealth at the top isn’t in a vault of gold bars,” Adam Michel, director of Tax Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, told The Epoch Times.
“Roughly three-quarters of what the richest 0.1 percent hold is equity in operating companies, which includes firms that employ people, make things, and finance investment,” Michel said.
“Taxing this wealth converts productive capital into government revenue and shrinks the private sector’s most productive businesses.”
Capital Flight
In a September report, the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank, analyzed California’s proposed “billionaire’s tax,” which advocates said would raise $100 billion.
The institute estimated that, because of “billionaire departures from the state,” the one-time tax would raise only $30 billion, and that ongoing income-tax losses would further reduce future state revenues.
Echoing that assessment, the California Tax Foundation projected that billionaire departures and consequent economic spillover effects would cut state income tax revenue by $3.53 billion to $4.49 billion per year.
“Already, the publicly identified departures of nine billionaires have created a $2.77 billion recurring tax revenue loss,” the foundation stated.
Billionaires who have already left California since the wealth tax was proposed include Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, film director and Amblin Entertainment founder Steven Spielberg, PayPal Founder Peter Thiel, Uber founder Travis Kalanick, Hankey Group founder Don Hankey, and others.
Going Nationwide, Going Global
To prevent capital from escaping state-level wealth taxes, some proponents, including United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby, say the tax must be implemented nationwide in the United States.
“It won’t work by state because people will just move,” Kirby said in an October CNBC interview, “and I think we should have inheritance taxes that get close to 100 percent at some level.”
Critics say that could simply drive investment out of the United States.
Out-migration of investment is “the main reason why most countries that have adopted wealth taxes have since rescinded them,” Jason Sorens, an economist at the American Institute for Economic Research, told The Epoch Times.
Countries that imposed wealth taxes and then revoked them include Austria, Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, Finland, Luxembourg, Sweden, and France.
An exception is Switzerland, Sorens said, but that country has remained an attractive destination for investment because “its overall tax burden is low and the rates of wealth taxation are also held low.”
A national U.S. wealth tax “would just trade interstate competition for international competition,” Michel said. “People and capital cross country borders too, which is why the standard answer from wealth tax advocates is a global minimum wealth tax.”
Efforts to establish global taxes have gained momentum in recent years. In 2021, the Biden administration backed a global minimum income tax on companies, and in 2024, the Brazilian government proposed a 2 percent global wealth tax on the world’s 3,000 richest people.
However, a 2026 analysis of Brazil’s proposal by EY, an international consulting group, projected that a global 2 percent wealth tax would reduce worldwide GDP by $80 billion per year, eliminate 2 million jobs, and reduce labor income by $10 billion each year, and that these cuts would increase substantially over time.
Taxing Only the Ultra-Rich
There are also concerns that governments will expand wealth taxes beyond the ultra-rich once they have the mandate to impose them.
Warren claims her bill would affect only the wealthiest Americans, “without raising taxes on 99.85 percent of American households.” Sanders and Khanna likewise say that, according to their wealth tax bill, “no one who has a net worth of less than $1 billion would pay a penny more in taxes.”
But the history of income taxes casts doubt on these claims.
The first federal income tax, the Revenue Act of 1861, was repealed in 1872. In 1909, President William H. Taft proposed a new income tax of 2 percent on corporations. Over the next few years, progressive lawmakers pushed for an individual income tax. Conservative lawmakers, hoping to block the tax, proposed structuring it as a constitutional amendment, believing it would never be ratified by three-fourths of the states.
But, the Sixteenth Amendment was ratified, and the individual income tax came with with the Revenue Act of 1913.
This tax applied only to the top 1 percent of Americans, who at the time earned more than $3,000 per year, and the rate ranged from 1 percent to 7 percent of income.
However, the amendment set no thresholds, and an income tax that initially affected only the richest 1 percent of Americans was ultimately expanded to the vast majority.
The initial rate, capped at 7 percent of income, was increased to a maximum rate of 94 percent in 1944, then reduced in stages to the current top rate of 37 percent.
In addition, the question remains whether a federal wealth tax, as currently envisioned, is constitutional or would require an amendment, similar to the imposition of income taxes.
Current wealth tax bills are not legal, Michel says, because “the Constitution requires direct taxes to be apportioned among the states.”
Direct taxes are assessed on individuals rather than on transactions, such as sales tax or tariffs.
Under the Constitution, such taxes must be assessed in proportion to state populations rather than by wealth thresholds, which could require a national wealth tax, if passed, to be enacted through a Constitutional amendment.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
