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The Uncomfortable Progressive Case for Tom Steyer
Despite being a billionaire himself, Steyer appears to be the only major candidate in California's governor race openly escalating conflict with the monopolies, corporate interests, and institutional failures driving the state's affordability crisis.
Jun 02, 2026
California voters are clearly hungry for change. The real question now is whether Democrats are willing to confront the corporate interests and entrenched systems standing in the way of it.
That is one reason a growing number of progressives, labor organizers, climate activists, and anti-corporate advocates are rallying behind Tom Steyer despite longstanding discomfort with billionaire politics.
At first glance, that coalition can feel contradictory. Progressives have spent years warning, correctly, about the dangers of concentrated wealth and billionaire influence in American politics. Many still believe that billionaires should not exist in a healthy democracy.
So why are so many anti-corporate organizers increasingly rallying behind one now?
The question is not whether candidates are perfect vessels for progressive ideals. The question is whether they are willing to pick the right fights.
Because politics is ultimately about conflict. It is about who is willing to challenge concentrated power, which interests candidates are willing to confront, and whether they are prepared to pursue structural change instead of simply managing decline.
The question is not whether someone benefited from broken systems. The question is whether they are willing to confront the systems that produced their own power in the first place.
And increasingly, Tom Steyer appears to be the only major candidate in California's governor race openly escalating conflict with the monopolies, corporate interests, and institutional failures driving the state's affordability crisis.
That matters because California is not entering a traditional election environment.
Recent polling suggests Xavier Becerra is increasingly likely to secure one of the two spots in California's top-two primary. Whether voters like it or not, that reality changes the strategic conversation.
At a moment when voters are demanding structural change, Becerra increasingly represents continuity politics. He has struggled to articulate a meaningful critique of the status quo or explain what he would fundamentally do differently than Gavin Newsom.
The question facing many progressive voters is no longer simply which candidate they prefer. It is whether a candidate willing to challenge concentrated power, monopoly interests, and entrenched systems will make it into the general election at all.
That matters because Steve Hilton is running aggressively as an anti-establishment change candidate. If Democrats allow this race to become a contest between a candidate associated with continuity and a Republican claiming the mantle of disruption, they risk ceding the language of change to the right.
You cannot defeat a change candidate with a status quo candidate.
You need a competing change agent.
Steyer is increasingly positioning himself as one.
What makes this politically significant is not simply that he uses progressive rhetoric. Plenty of candidates do that. What matters is that he is embracing policies that directly confront concentrated wealth and monopoly power, including support for single-payer healthcare, a billionaire tax, breaking up utility monopolies, lowering energy costs, expanding public education, and building affordable housing at scale.
Those are not symbolic positions. They are direct challenges to entrenched systems of political and economic power.
And increasingly, many progressives believe the clearest indicator of that conflict is not who Steyer is. It is who is lining up against him.
When utility monopolies, fossil fuel interests, anti-tax billionaires, and major corporations begin mobilizing against the same candidate, voters should pay attention.
That does not mean progressives suddenly agree with everything about Tom Steyer or billionaire politics generally. It means many recognize that political alignment matters more than biography alone.
The question is not whether candidates are perfect vessels for progressive ideals. The question is whether they are willing to pick the right fights.
For many progressives, supporting Steyer is not about abandoning skepticism toward wealth or power. It is about recognizing that in moments of deep public frustration, the most important political question becomes who is actually willing to confront the forces making life increasingly unaffordable, unstable, and unequal.
That is the uncomfortable reality reshaping this race.
The question facing California voters is no longer whether the state needs change.
It is whether a candidate willing to fight for that change will still be standing when the general election begins.
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Billionaires' Tax Filings Agree With AOC. They Don't "Earn" Their Billions.
Elon Musk would need to work 58 times longer than the age of the universe to "earn" his wealth.
May 29, 2026
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) kicked off a storm when she said in a podcast interview last week that a person cannot “earn” a billion dollars.
Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas responded by saying that the statement was “bizarrely foolish” and then pointed to the worst possible example he could think of to counter Ocasio-Cortez’s point: mega-billionaire Elon Musk.
In the eyes of the US government, and specifically the IRS, there’s no question about it. Elon Musk did not “earn” his wealth. Otherwise, he’d be paying a tax rate at least 17 times greater than he is—and generating a tax bill bigger than the GDP of Nevada.
Unless you’re immortal, Ocasio-Cortez is indeed correct that it’s impossible to earn a billion dollars.
The average US worker, earning $64,505 a year, would have to work over 15,500 years to “earn” a billion dollars. Want to be as rich as Elon Musk? You’d have to work 41 times longer than humans existed—over 12 million years.
But what if you are Elon Musk? How long would it you take then? A billion years to earn a billion dollars, and 800 billion years to earn $800 billion—so, 58 times longer than the existence of the known universe.
Now that’s bizarre.
The average US worker, earning $64,505 a year, would have to work over 15,500 years to “earn” a billion dollars. Want to be as rich as Elon Musk? You’d have to work 41 times longer than humans existed—over 12 million years.
Elon Musk—like Mark Zuckerburg, Larry Elison and many of the world’s other richest men—only “earns” $1 a year. He is what's known as a $1 CEO because he gets paid an annual salary of $1.
What most people don’t realize when we talk about wealth and wealth taxes is that we’re talking about two types of wealth. There’s earned wealth, which is when you get paid for you what you do (eg salaries, wages, etc). And then there’s collected wealth, which is when you get paid for what you own—eg dividends for owning stocks or rent money for owning real estate.
Most people primarily rely on earned wealth for a living. Billionaires on the other hand, their wealth is almost entirely collected wealth.
And that matters, because collected wealth tends to grow a lot faster than earned wealth, but more importantly, because governments tend to tax collected wealth a lot less than earned wealth.
In fact, billionaires very often deliberately reshuffle their wealth around into collected types of wealth specifically to underreport what they “earn” to the IRS and pay less income tax. It’s why Elon Musk can be the world’s richest man on an annual salary of $1. It’s why he and Jeff Bezos have been able to pay zero income taxes in some years while topping the Forbes richest people's list. It's also why Bezos was able to receive a family tax credit for families earning less than $100,000 a year.
But it gets even more bizarre.
Many billionaires aren’t just not earning much, they’re hopelessly in debt—apparently. Many of them are actually living off huge loans that they don’t expect to pay off in their lifetimes. It’s a scheme called “Buy, Borrow, Die.”
Taking their tax allergies to the extreme, rather than selling assets to get the money they need to actually pay for things, some billionaires take out loans against their assets instead. This way, they don’t have to pay the taxes that would have applied if they sold their assets, plus they get to hold on to the assets which can become worth even more over time. And because the money they get this way is technically loan money, it doesn’t count as earned income—and so they can continue to underreport their “earnings” to the IRS and underpay tax.
It might come as a shock to Sen Cruz, but many US billionaires, like his example Elon Musk, have done all they can to “earn” as little to none of their wealth, and some have even gone so far as to “indebt” their billions instead.
But why should we care about any of this?
Because it’s this two-tier tax system that gives special treatment to collected wealth over earned wealth that has allowed the extreme wealth of super-rich individuals to quadruple since the 1980s.
The rise of extreme wealth is directly linked to lower economic productivity, to more households going into debt, and to people living shorter lives. A G20 report co-authored by winner of the Nobel prize for economics Joseph Stiglitz warns that extreme wealth is a threat to democracy.
What makes wealth taxes so powerful—and so opposed by a vocal minority among the superrich—isn’t just the huge sums of public funds they can bring in. It’s that by specifically taxing collected wealth, wealth taxes directly challenge this two-tier tax system. It’s about protecting economies, people and planet from the harms of extreme wealth.
Whether you’re a wealth earner or a wealth collector, we all have an equal responsibility to pitch in our fair share.
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It's Time for Ultra-Wealthy Private Jet Owners to Pay Their Fair Share
The Stop Subsidizing Private Jets Act of 2026 would end loopholes allowing billionaires to deduct private planes as business expenses.
May 27, 2026
One of the great injustices of our current tax system is that working people often end up subsidizing the luxury consumption of the billionaire class.
One example of this phenomena can be found in the world of private jets, one of the most ecologically indefensible forms of transformation. The private jet lobby has worked for years to secure tax breaks for aircraft purchases and fuel—and shift their costs on to taxpayers and the commercial flying public.
The lobby scored a big win when a 100% bonus depreciation for business assets including private planes was included in the 2017 Trump tax cut. That provision was renewed in 2025’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.”
With that provision in place, if a billionaire buys a $170 million luxury jet, they can deduct the entire purchase as a business expense in the year they buy it, greatly reducing their tax bill. Most business expenses are deducted to reflect their depreciation over multiple years. A purchase of a truck or vehicle, for example, is typically depreciated over five years.
Every day commercial flyers are taxed more heavily for their tickets compared to private jet travelers who are only taxed on their jet fuel.
Current tax loopholes give the ultra wealthy—including both private citizens and businesses—millions in tax write-offs for their luxurious travel, including the costs of planes themselves and related expenditures like private pilots and fuel.
The Private Jet Accountability Project (PJAP) at the Institute for Policy Studies has been working with members of Congress to rollback these subsidies. US Reps. Eugene Vindman (D-Va.), Kristen McDonald Rivet (D-Mich.), and Greg Landsman (D-Ohio) recently introduced the Stop Subsidizing Private Jets Act of 2026.
“Right now, the tax code allows those buying private jets worth tens of millions of dollars to receive enormous write-offs, while middle-class families do not get deductions for basics like gas or groceries. That is wrong,” Vindman said in a statement. “My bill is a commonsense fix that ends these unfair giveaways while protecting farmers, small businesses, and emergency responders who depend on aviation for real business and community needs.”
Today, private jets, even those valued at $100 million or more, are not considered a luxury vehicle, which means the full value can be a business expense write-off. Expenses such as fuel, pilots, decor, and in-flight services are also a write-off. It is estimated that the owner of a $100 million jet can get a $21 million tax benefit.
This legislation will end these loopholes while protecting “exemptions for aircraft, primarily used to transport property, as well as planes used for agriculture, firefighting, emergency medical services, flight instruction, sky diving operations, and certain commercial flights available to the public” as described in the bill.
These are funds we cannot afford to lose. An Institute for Policy Studies report found that private air travel is a significant portion of air traffic, with a ratio of 1 private jet per 6 commercial planes. Despite this, private jet travel only contributes 2% of the taxes that go to fund the Federal Aviation Administration. At the same time, people flying commercial pay a 7.5% federal excise tax on tickets to fund the FAA’s Airport and Airway Trust Fund. Every day commercial flyers are taxed more heavily for their tickets compared with private jet travelers who are only taxed on their jet fuel.
“It’s ridiculous and unfair that the ultra wealthy get million-dollar tax breaks for their private jets while working families are seeing their healthcare and food assistance cut,” said Rep. McDonald Rivet. “We need to get rid of this insane loophole, because if you can afford a private jet, you can afford to pay your fair share in taxes.”
“The fact that our tax dollars are still funding tax breaks for someone’s private jet is insane,” Rep. Landsman added. “We have to fix the tax code so the super wealthy stop getting special treatment, and our small businesses and farmers can actually get ahead.”
In the face of the jet fuel crisis, European lawmakers are exploring banning certain kinds of private jet operations. Here in the US, all we are asking is that private jets pay their fair share.
Luxury travel that isn’t taxed appropriately epitomizes the inequality that exists in the tax and travel systems. Why should everyday Americans foot the bill for the ultra-wealthy’s private air travel and the air travel infrastructure we all use?
The passage of the Stop Subsidizing Private Jets Act of 2026 is an important step in correcting the imbalance of wealth and power in our democracy.
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