By Steve Huntley

April 26^th, 2026

You’ll be reading this on a tablet, smart phone, laptop or desktop computer. Pause for a moment to consider the wonder and magic of these devices.

They and the software already embedded in them, or added to meet your needs, do so much: Written, voice and video communications, and those available on a global scale. Encyclopedia-like sources of information. Entertainment, music and movies. Instantaneous complex calculations. Electronic credit card payments. Help to do your taxes. GPS-based travel instructions. Photographic and video memories of your life. And many more functions that you could add.

And the devices are wealth creators, generating jobs to make, market and distribute these remarkable products and inspiring new jobs and commerce in new businesses made possible by the digital revolution.

Yes, there are downsides such as obsessive screen time, the poison of social media, especially for children, and fears about AI. But no one would give up these devices that have so transformed and enriched our lives.

And they have more directly enriched their inventors, making some people fabulously wealthy, the most successful of them billionaires.

Some of the names behind the digital revolution are familiar. Like the late Steve Jobs, the genius of Apple. Michael Dell of the eponymous Dell Technologies. Bill Gates of Microsoft. Elon Musk, a trailblazer in internet, electric car and space ventures. Jeff Bezos who made tens of millions of us turn from the shopping mall to e-commerce. Mark Zuckerberg, a pioneer in social media. There are many other names you can add to this list of those who have enriched our lives and thereby made themselves fabulously wealthy.

 

Not among the names of those responsible for our wondrous modern lifestyle: Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Or any of the other advocates of special taxes on the “rich.”

They are not inventors like those who gave us the smart phone. They are not creators like those who saw these amazing devices and thought up Facebook, Instagram, X/Twitter or other social media platforms. They are not far-sighted investors who saw new ways to make money in the digital world, such as through Amazon, PayPal, Ebay and the like.

No, Sanders, AOC, Mamdani, Warren and their like can only come up with ways to pick the pocket of those who have prospered from their creative imaginations. These politicians and activists have more in common with thieves, parasites and leeches than they do with the inventive, visionary and original minds behind the technologically advanced world we live in today.

The feeble imaginations of these rabble-rousing politicians can only feed on envy, can only come up with new tax schemes. And those machinations, for all the high-minded words pushing them, have but one aim: to expand the reach of government and make as many people as possible dependent on government. That of course increases the power of the politicians pushing the schemes. Sanders and Democrat Rep. Ro Khanna of California are proposing a new wealth tax on billionaires.

Unleash Prosperity, a free-market advocacy organization, counts eight states that “already have or are considering raising income or wealth taxes.”

Illinois Democrats are pushing a constitutional amendment for 3 percent tax on anyone making more than $1 million a year. That would hit far more than billionaires, ever increasing the tax burden of doing business in Illinois for enterprises large and small. The good news is that Democrat leaders in the Legislature don’t have the votes to get it on the ballot this year. The bad news is that they aren’t giving up and will try to get  it on the ballot for the 2028 election.

In Minnesota, reports the Power Line blog, Democrats propose a wealth tax on “all of a taxpayer’s property, real or personal, tangible or intangible,” starting at $10 million — hardly a measure aimed at billionaires.

Wealth creators are mobile. They see a government reaching into their pockets and many pull up stakes and move. The economic opportunities they create in their new home states and the economic malaise in high-tax states prompt legions of the middle class to follow.

The Wall Street Journal looked at IRS data and found high earners, businesses and the upper middle class fleeing California, New York, Illinois and other Democrat-run high-tax states for Florida, Texas and other mostly red states with low taxes or even no income tax.

A Bank of Canada study, reported by Power Line, found a problem of “inventor migration” in our neighbor to the north. That liberal country’s policies have resulted in “at least 40 percent of Canadians whose ability would place them in the top income” bracket now living in the United States.

Pickpocket demagogues like Sanders, spout inflammatory speeches about rich oligarchs or the greedy rich who don’t pay their “fair share” of taxes. Yet, IRS figures show that the top 1 percent of earners “make 26 percent of the income and pay 46 percent of the tax,” reports Unleash Prosperity. The top 10 percent pay 72 percent of income taxes. What’s a fair shared?

The politicians pushing for new taxes on the rich aren’t trying to balance a budget and pay current bills but rather they want to launch new programs.

For instance, the soak-the-billionaire bill from Sanders and Khanna would fund $3,000 payments to every person in a household making $150,000 or less, which would be $12,000 for a family of four.

As you can see, Sanders and Khanna are the equivalent of dope dealers trying to hook average Americans on the crack cocaine of free money from government. They have no interest in addressing the national debt which has soared to more than $39 trillion. It’s a ticking time bomb menacing the nation’s future. But the raise-taxes crowd is only interested in spending more.

The Illinois proposal would do nothing to address the state’s wretched financial health. Democrats are divided over whether to spend it all on property tax relief or give a portion to teachers, i.e. the state’s all powerful teacher unions.

Is there “income and wealth inequality” in America?

Of course there is. It’s a product of any society. The Economist magazine recently reported on big income inequality in China and found the government there — a communist regime! — showing no interest in doing anything about it.

It’s easy to complain about income equality and to condemn the wealthy who don’t deserve our admiration.Most of us can look at billionaires and reasonably ask, how much more do they need? How much more can they spend?

And what about super-rich entertainers who float through the skies in private jets while preaching to us about climate change?

Don’t forget the wealthy studio bosses who churn out movies trashing capitalism while they often abandon Hollywood to film their shows and movies in cities and states offering big tax breaks.

Then there are the politicians who get rich while in office. Sanders owns three homes.

Barack Obama soared from a community organizer and adjunct law professor to an ex-president with a fortune estimated by Forbes magazine at $70 million and homes in Martha’s Vineyard, Hawaii, Chicago and Washington, D.C. Obama and Sanders would say their wealth comes from books and, in Obama’s case, a lucrative deal with Netflix. Yet all that happened because of their political careers. It smacks of insider influence.

A brouhaha broke out recently over the finances of Squad member Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. A recent financial filing portrayed her and her husband having become multi-millionaires since she entered Congress. Her 2024 financial disclosure filed last year rated their wealth at as much as $30 million, up from no more than $51,000 the previous year, reported the Washington Free Beacon. After the uproar over that, she issued a revised report saying it was all an accounting error and that she’s worth no more than $95,000. An accounting error of $29 million! You won’t be surprised to hear that has been met with a bit of skepticism.

Then there are those who inherit great fortunes. Are they unworthy billionaires?

Consider JB Pritzker, the Democrat governor of Illinois. He inherited billions as an heir to the highly successful Hyatt Hotels business and has a net worth of $3.9 billion, according to Forbes magazine. Now, he might boast that he increased his wealth through investments. I expect that most of us could do a little successful investing if we started out with a couple of billion bucks in our wallet.

It might be worth noting here that Pritzker does a lot of “investing” in politics. For instance, federal campaign finance disclosure reports showed that he had dropped $10 million to promote the U.S. Senate candidacy of his lieutenant governor. His contributions turned out to make up the vast majority of the funds raised by the political action committee supporting Juliana Stratton, according to Capitol News Illinois.

A few years ago, Pritzker spent millions, through the $24 million he gave a Democratic Party group, in an Illinois Republican primary to boost the prospects of a GOP gubernatorial candidate he judged the easiest for him to beat in the 2022 general election. Some might reasonably call that election interference. In all, Pritzker spent $323 million in his 2018 and 2022 gubernatorial campaigns.

It was pretty rich (pun intended) to hear Pritzker recently condemn as “special interest money” contributions by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro Israel lobby, in political races in Illinois. As if his political cash isn’t “special interest money,” as if his own political ambitions aren’t a special interest.

You can make you own judgment about whether Pritzker is a useless billionaire but he’s certainly a billionaire hypocrite.

At any rate, aside from the obvious exception of criminal enterprises, government and politicians have no business judging whose wealth is worthy or unworthy.

Imagine a world without billionaires — and the contributions the most inventive and creative among them have made to society. No billionaires, no smartphone. No laptop. No tablets. No Internet. No Amazon. No Instagram or TikTok. And on and on.

Many of the billionaires Sanders and AOC hate, and we might envy, are ultra-rich thanks to their creativity. And we enjoy the fruits of their inventiveness in the wondrous modern lifestyle we take for granted.

-30-

Steve Huntley is a retired Chicago journalist living in Austin, Texas, who spent most of his career, almost three decades, with the Chicago Sun-Times, where he was a feature writer, metro reporter, night city editor, metropolitan editor, editorial page editor and a columnist for the opinion pages. Before that he was a reporter and editor with United Press International (UPI) in the South and Chicago, and Chicago bureau chief and a senior editor in Washington with U.S. News & World Report. Northwestern University Press has issued soft cover and eBook editions of Knocking Down Barriers: My Fight for Black America by Truman K. Gibson Jr. with Steve Huntley, a memoir of a Chicagoan who was a member of President Roosevelt’s World War II Black Cabinet working to desegregate the military.