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Senator Bernie Sanders has been on TV and in interviews calling out billionaires for flooding California with money to kill a proposed “billionaire” tax. He sounded angry and moral — which is fine for headlines. But the easy question everyone sneers about — “Why doesn’t he just tax billionaires in Vermont?” — has a simple, boring answer: he can’t, and even if he could it wouldn’t do much. That’s the real story behind the sound bites.
What Sanders said and the new media moment
In recent interviews, Senator Bernie Sanders blasted wealthy donors who poured hundreds of millions into ads and campaigns to stop California’s ballot push, often called Proposition 40. He called that spending “disgusting” and urged voters to stand up to concentrated wealth and power. That is the news hook: Sanders is loudly backing a big-state effort and criticizing the heavy pocketbook pressure used to defeat it.
Why Senator Sanders can’t “tax billionaires in Vermont”
First, Sanders is a U.S. senator, not the governor or state legislature of Vermont. Federal lawmakers don’t write state tax codes. States set their own taxes. Second, Vermont barely has any billionaires to tax. You can’t raise billions from a handful of people who live in a tiny state. Vermont’s whole budget is only in the single-digit billions range, so a state-only wealth grab would be a rounding error. Third, wealth taxes are hard to run. Valuing private companies, art, and illiquid assets creates legal fights and huge paperwork. Small states usually don’t have the tax machines to do that without paying outside consultants and losing in court.
Legal and practical roadblocks: the facts behind the gripe
States trying wealth taxes face real legal hurdles — interstate travel, commerce issues, retroactive claims and equal protection fights are not just talking points. Courts and scholars have warned that these measures invite long, expensive lawsuits. That’s one reason Sanders pushes a national plan: a federal law would capture scale and avoid the “one-bite” problem a small state faces. So his public fist-shaking at billionaire ad buys in California fits a political strategy, not a workable plan for Vermont.
Bottom line: noise, strategy, and real-world limits
Skeptics can call this hypocrisy, and sure — it’s easy to accuse a senator of grandstanding on cable news. But the real takeaway is practical: Sanders is campaigning for big, national change and for state efforts that can move real money. Vermont can’t be the test lab for a nationwide wealth tax because it lacks scale, legal firepower, and political structure for it to matter. If you want to criticize Sanders, do it for promising nationwide solutions that are unlikely to pass, not for not doing the impossible in a state that has almost no billionaires to begin with.
