The Classicist With Victor Davis Hanson: “The New Dark-Age Mind”

The headline from the recently released 2026 Medicare Trustees Report was that the Medicare Health Insurance (HI) Trust Fund would exhaust its reserves in 2033—1 year before the Social Security trust funds were also projected to meet the same fate.

Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Ro Khanna just introduced a bill proposing a permanent national 5% wealth tax on billionaires, along with an ambitious spending program for the results. (Press release, bill, summary.) It’s permanent. The fig leaf of California’s “just this once” tax is off.

There are a lot of problems with California’s proposed “billionaire tax,” Proposition 40. One of the biggest is how a billionaire might actually pay it. Tech founders usually have their wealth tied up in their companies. And they could not easily sell their shares to pay massive tax bills.