Over the past year, I traveled the country, from Arizona to Alaska, Iowa to Georgia, talking with everyday Americans about rising costs, health care, and what they think the government should provide in exchange for their hard-earned tax dollars. In more than 55 town hall meetings, not one person stood up to ask for a tax cut. Instead, Americans want the rich and big corporations to pay their fair share so that their cost of living can finally go down.
Washington hasn’t gotten that memo yet.
Sens. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.) recently introduced new tax plans that would reduce taxes for low- and middle-income Americans. The proposals are well-intentioned, but they amount to fighting the last war with a stale playbook. The idea that middle-class families most need a smaller tax bill misreads what people are actually experiencing. The affordability crisis isn’t about what families pay in April — it’s about what they pay every day, or what they can’t access at all.
Child care is unavailable or costs more than rent. Health care is unaffordable or out of reach. Colleges and higher education prices out working families or saddles young people with mountains of debt. These hurdles are the result of a rigged system that has created a lack of supply — and you can’t fix a supply problem by giving individuals tax cuts.
Here’s what I kept hearing at doors, in diners, at town halls: People are angry that the taxes they pay don’t seem to buy anything for them anymore, while those who benefit the most from the system appear to pay the least, or nothing at all. That’s an argument for fixing who pays taxes and how the money is used, not tossing people a tax cut as a Band-Aid for a bullet wound.
Polling bears this out. A February national survey conducted on behalf of Families Over Billionaires found that more than four in five likely voters support raising taxes on corporations, and more than seven in 10 want the wealthiest individuals to pay more.
Crucially, this isn’t just a liberal view, it’s a consensus. Two-thirds of independents support higher taxes on the rich. So do many of President Donald Trump’s voters: 51 percent want to raise taxes on wealthy individuals, and 67 percent want to raise taxes on corporations. Even after hearing the best arguments against raising taxes on the rich, more than two in three voters still support doing so.
It’s also politically advantageous. Sixty percent of voters say they’d be more likely to support a candidate who backs higher taxes on billionaires. Republican voters say the same thing by nearly a two-to-one margin.
The reason is simple. Americans are fed up with a system that treats the “haves” and “have-nots” very differently. Inequality has become so stark that many hardworking families feel they can’t keep up, let alone get ahead. Unsurprisingly, the same polling shows that “billionaires” are viewed negatively by 59 percent of respondents, while “the billionaire class” fares even worse, with 66 percent holding unfavorable views.
I saw this firsthand. When our canvassers knocked on more than 146,000 doors across eight congressional districts, deliberately reaching independents and soft conservatives, not just Democratic-base voters, the message about making the wealthy pay their fair share resonated.
In fact, conservative-leaning voters often responded most strongly. Voters who don’t tend to identify with one party or another made up about 15 percent of our target audience but nearly 20 percent of those who committed to take action.
“The system is rigged” wasn’t a partisan talking point. It reflected their daily lives.
Kenneth, a 72-year-old in Bakersfield, California, who’d voted Republican for decades, answered the door when our canvasser knocked. He’d beaten cancer twice, was living with his third pacemaker, and credits Medicaid with saving his life. He had little patience for the so-called Big Beautiful Bill. “Millionaires need to pay their fair share,” he said. For him, it wasn’t about politics. It was about making sure his health care remained funded for him and his neighbors.
That bill, which delivered massive tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans while cutting Medicaid and food assistance that helps everyday people, had a 64 percent disapproval rating across party lines when congressional Republicans voted to pass it last summer. Yet some Democrats appear to accept the right’s premise that the tax burden itself is the problem. It isn’t.
The Van Hollen and Booker proposals miss the real problem, which is that the things taxes are supposed to help Americans obtain — reliable health care, child care, education, and a secure retirement — are increasingly out of reach. Private markets are not delivering these services at a price people can afford, or, sometimes, at all.
The answer to “I can’t afford health care” is providing health care. The answer to “child care costs more than my mortgage” is providing affordable child care. Cutting taxes doesn’t build a single pediatric practice or open a single new child care slot. And if essential services disappear, a modest tax cut cannot replace them.
Taxing wealthy individuals and corporations more aggressively should be the starting point, not just to balance budgets, but to build systems that work for everyone. If we want a robust set of middle-class benefits, we need an honest conversation about revenue. Restoring the programs cut by the Big Beautiful Bill will require asking the wealthy to pay their fair share again. New taxes should be clearly tied to the programs they fund so people can see exactly what they receive in return.
Right now, the public is ahead of the politicians. They already believe the rich should pay more. The question is whether Democratic leaders will meet them where they are, or keep proposing half-measures that concede the argument to the people who broke the system in the first place.
Democrats need to update their playbook and expand their imagination. It is possible to tax the rich and corporations in ways that allow the government to deliver tangible services that improve people’s lives and strengthen the nation. They do not need to trade away the very revenue required to make meaningful policy a reality.
Kristen Crowell is the executive director of Families Over Billionaires.
