Written by Mars Strangelove Jr.
Curated by Yiannis Damellos
October 5, 2026
I don't hate the idea of Tesla. But I boycott their electric cars because of that Musk Nazi salute. I don't hate China either, but I won't buy into their ideology because it has nothing to do with Socialism. But every once in a while, a number comes along that makes me stop and look at the American economic system twice, and get really angry.
Tesla reported about $5.7 billion in U.S. income in 2025 and zero current federal income tax. Its cash federal income-tax payments were $28 million. In China, meanwhile, Tesla reported $751 million in cash income-tax payments. The numbers do not mean Tesla is doing anything illegal; tax credits, deductions, accumulated losses, and international tax rules are all significant, but the contrast is real.
Now comes the devil's advocate. “Don't blame the businessman,” my ex-banker buddy says. “Blame the politicians. The businessman is accountable to shareholders. Politicians are accountable to the public. If the tax code allows a corporation to minimize its tax bill, the corporation is doing exactly what corporations are supposed to do. Make more profit.”
That's not a bad argument. In fact, it leads directly to the democratic-socialist argument.
"Then change the rules."
A corporation has every incentive to reduce its costs, including its tax bill, within the law. The question for democracy is why the law permits a company to report billions in domestic income while its current federal income-tax bill can reach zero. The answer isn't that Tesla somehow failed a moral examination. The answer is that the tax system produced that result.
And the people who write that system are elected politicians.
That is why the billionaire question is ultimately political, not merely a corporate one. The Federal Reserve's latest distributional accounts show the top 0.1% of American households holding about $27.9 trillion in wealth in the second quarter of 2026, compared with about $4.3 trillion for the entire bottom half of American households.
Bernie Sanders' answer is straightforward: tax wealth at the very top. His 2026 proposal with Rep. Ro Khanna would impose an annual 5% wealth tax on households worth more than $1 billion. Sanders and economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman estimate that it could raise roughly $4.4 trillion over a decade. The proposal would also provide a $3,000 payment to people in households earning $150,000 or less in its first year.
Whether one supports that particular proposal or not, the underlying question is hardly revolutionary: Should the people who have accumulated the most from the American economy contribute more toward maintaining the society and infrastructure that made that accumulation possible?
And then there is the other side of the paradox: food assistance. This, practically, drives me mad.
In fiscal 2024, only 28% of SNAP households had earned income overall. But among SNAP households with children, 54% had earned income. SNAP is not simply a program for people who refuse to work, yet the conservative media pipeline will tell us otherwise, while millions of households receiving it include people who are working and still do not earn enough to meet basic needs.
That is where the argument becomes bigger than Tesla.
A democratic society can decide that some people will eventually become extraordinarily wealthy. It can encourage investment, reward entrepreneurship, and allow companies to make enormous profits. But it can also decide that nobody who works full time should need public assistance simply to put food on the table. Those are not contradictory principles. And they become contradictory when the political system is extraordinarily creative about protecting accumulated wealth while treating the poverty of working families as an administrative problem to be managed.
And this is where Musk's campaign money enters the room.
Elon Musk spent more than $259 million supporting Donald Trump's 2024 presidential campaign, according to FEC filings. His America PAC reported more than $261 million in disbursements during the 2024 cycle. That proves something simple and very important: a single billionaire can deploy hundreds of millions of dollars to influence the political environment in which his businesses operate. You and I can't.
That is not necessarily corruption. It's just the way it is. And this is precisely the problem. If billionaires can spend hundreds of millions helping elect politicians, while corporations employ armies of lawyers and accountants to navigate the tax code, while working families are told that the government simply cannot afford to feed every child, then the argument cannot end with “the businessman is only doing his job.”
Who designed the job? And who benefits when the rules remain exactly as they are?
Sanders' broader argument is that taxation alone is not enough. His recent proposals also include universal school meals, stronger worker protections, and measures intended to ensure that the gains from automation and artificial intelligence do not accrue overwhelmingly to owners of capital. His proposed Universal School Meals Program Act of 2026 would provide free meals to every student regardless of family income.
That points toward the institutional change we actually need: rebuilding the relationship between wealth, taxation, and citizens. That is redistribution of wealth. And it is hardly a radical idea from the last century.
Tax the wealth that has become extraordinarily concentrated. Close loopholes that allow profits to migrate offshore. Make the tax system genuinely progressive. Strengthen the social floor so that food assistance is not a stigma attached to working poverty. And make political money less capable of determining who gets heard in Washington.
None of that requires hating. It requires asking a very old democratic question that should be the real issue of the Midterms: If the economy belongs to everyone who helps build it, why should the rules governing its wealth be written primarily for those who already have the most of it?
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