UBI as Defense Against the Epstein Class

UBI as Defense Against the Epstein Class

American politics has normalized a strange moral asymmetry. Ordinary people are expected to accept coercion as a fact of life. Rent comes due whether wages are up or down. Medical bills arrive whether the timing is survivable or not. A bad work schedule, a broken car, or a missed paycheck can throw a household into crisis. Yet the moment anyone proposes even a modest constraint on extreme wealth, the same political culture suddenly discovers an absolute reverence for freedom. The Sanders-Khanna "Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share Act" exposes that asymmetry in unusually concrete form. Announced on March 2, 2026, it would impose a 5 percent annual wealth tax on 938 American billionaires worth a combined $8.2 trillion, and in its first year would send a $3,000 direct payment to every person in households making $150,000 or less. Economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman estimate roughly $4.4 trillion in revenue over ten years. That pairing matters. It turns abstract resentment at oligarchy into a visible public claim on concentrated wealth and a visible material gain for everyone else. [1][2][3] (Senator Bernie Sanders)

The phrase "Epstein class" gives this argument its moral vocabulary, but it has to be used carefully. In Vox's March 2026 interview, Ro Khanna does not define the term as "all rich people." He defines it as "rich and powerful people" who think they can use money and status to stay above the law. He also says plainly that the issue is not a witch hunt. It is "two tiers of justice in America," a system in which people with power and wealth can evade even investigation or prosecution. The American Prospect makes the same move when it describes the Epstein files as exposing "the impunity the rich and powerful possess as a social class." Anita Chabria's Los Angeles Times column pushes that logic outward, treating "Epstein" less as a single scandal than as a symbol of an elite governing class that has "gotten away with impunity" while working-class communities are told to absorb the cost. Taken together, those sources support a structural use of the term. "Epstein class" names a social position defined by insulation, secrecy, and selective enforcement, not a blanket accusation against every wealthy person. [3][4][5] (Vox)

Once that definition is clear, the bridge from two-tier justice to two-tier economics becomes easier to see. The legal story is about selective accountability. The economic story is about selective exposure to risk. Brookings shows just how different life looks at the top of the distribution. For the bottom 80 percent of households, wages and retirement income make up 94 percent of adjusted gross income. For the top 0.01 percent, those sources fall to 15 percent, and for the top 0.001 percent they fall to 7 percent. At that level, investments and business income dominate. Brookings also notes that the tilt is even steeper in practice because adjusted gross income excludes massive unrealized capital gains and large inheritances. Wages face heavier taxation than much capital income, and unrealized gains are not taxed until sale. Wealthy households can even finance consumption through the "buy, borrow, die" strategy, borrowing against appreciated assets while deferring tax liability. The Federal Reserve's Distributional Financial Accounts help show that this is not rhetoric. They provide a standing public record of wealth concentration across groups such as the top 0.1 percent and the rest of the top 1 percent. The point is not that the rich have an official UBI. It is that the most secure households already live with a form of material unconditionality that ordinary workers do not. [7][8] (Federal Reserve)

That difference matters because precarity is not only a hardship. It is a governing mechanism. The Federal Reserve's 2024 economic well-being report found that only 63 percent of adults said they would cover a hypothetical $400 emergency expense exclusively with cash or its equivalent. A country in which more than a third of adults would need to borrow, sell something, or fail to cover a modest emergency is not a country where freedom is evenly distributed. Sanders translated the same condition into political language in the wealth-tax rollout, saying the United States cannot tolerate "60% of our people living paycheck to paycheck" while 938 billionaires have become vastly richer. Whether one prefers the Fed's measure or Sanders's phrase, the underlying reality is the same. A large share of the public lives close enough to the edge that employers, landlords, lenders, and private gatekeepers can exercise power without ever issuing a direct command. Scarcity does the commanding for them. [1][6] (Federal Reserve)

This is why a cash floor should be understood as defense before it is understood as aspiration. A guaranteed income does not abolish markets, hierarchy, or bad luck. It does something more basic. It weakens the everyday coercion that comes from having no cushion at all. Someone with a guaranteed cash floor has more power to leave a dangerous job, refuse a predatory loan, endure a rent hike long enough to find another apartment, or take a day off to apply for better work. The practical question is not whether cash makes life perfect. It is whether cash expands the range of choices available to people who live one emergency away from breakdown. If it does, then UBI belongs in the same category as other republican safeguards against domination. It is not only anti-poverty policy. It is a means of reducing the number of private actors who can rule other people through fear of immediate deprivation. [1][6] (Senator Bernie Sanders)

The Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration offers unusually good evidence for that claim. SEED gave 125 Stockton residents $500 per month for 24 months beginning in February 2019. The cash was unconditional, with no work requirement and no spending restriction. In the preliminary first-year report, researchers found that full-time employment among recipients rose from 28 percent to 40 percent, while the control group saw a smaller rise from 32 percent to 37 percent. The same report found lower income volatility and better mental-health outcomes among recipients. These results matter because they challenge the standard caricature of unconditional cash as a retreat from work. In Stockton, the extra money was associated with more full-time work, not less. That is exactly what one would expect if scarcity itself is part of the labor-market trap. [9] (Center for Guaranteed Income Research)

The mechanism in Stockton is just as important as the topline numbers. The researchers say the shift toward full-time employment was tied to the removal of "material barriers" and "time and capacity limits" created by scarcity and precarity. That language is refreshingly concrete. People were not becoming better workers because a cash transfer moralized them. They were becoming more capable of pursuing better work because they could cut back a few hours, finish a certification, cover transportation, or absorb the short-term costs that usually block long-term improvement. The report also includes a more intimate but equally political example: one participant said that with a program like SEED earlier in life, she would have been able to leave an abusive relationship sooner. That is the defense case in one sentence. Money does not simply buy goods. It buys exit. It buys time. It buys the ability to say no before harm becomes inescapable. [9]

GiveDirectly's large Kenya UBI study broadens the case by testing a familiar objection under very different conditions. Its 2023 summary reports that monthly UBI "did not create idleness." Recipients invested, became more entrepreneurial, and earned more; they did not work less or drink more. The same summary is especially useful because it compares designs. A 12-year UBI and a large lump sum both performed strongly, while a two-year monthly UBI was the least effective of the three, though still positive. That comparison helps clarify a point often lost in American debates. Cash does not work by sprinkling a little relief over a structurally insecure life. It works best when it creates genuine planning room. A real floor changes behavior because people can make choices against a stable horizon instead of a shrinking one. Short-term relief can help, but durability matters. [10] (GiveDirectly)

The Sanders-Khanna proposal matters, then, not only because it taxes the rich, but because it translates the revenue from extreme concentration into a broad, visible form of social power for everyone else. Saez and Zucman's memo gives the proposal a design logic that goes well beyond slogan. The tax would apply to net worth above $1 billion at a 5 percent annual rate, with a comprehensive base and no exemptions. Using Forbes real-time billionaire data as of January 1, 2026, they count 938 American billionaires with $8.189 trillion in wealth. Assuming 10 percent evasion or avoidance, they estimate about $4.4 trillion in revenue over the 2026-2037 budget window. They also argue that administration is feasible because the relevant population is small, about 1,000 people, making systematic audits possible. And because the liability would continue at the federal level, migration responses should be limited; renouncing citizenship would trigger an exit tax. This is not the language of vengeance. It is the language of governance. [1][2] (Senator Bernie Sanders)

That matters because the word "retribution" can mislead unless it is tied to democratic principle. The best case for taxing extreme wealth is not that billionaires should suffer. It is that democracies become unstable when a tiny class can convert asset ownership into permanent social insulation. Saez and Zucman put the point plainly: "Democracies become oligarchies when wealth becomes too concentrated." Their memo adds that billionaire wealth has more than doubled since 2019 and argues that a 5 percent annual tax would reduce the wealth of a typical billionaire by roughly half after fifteen years relative to a no-tax world. Brookings helps explain why that kind of clawback is legitimate. At the very top, economic power is generated less by wages than by ownership, appreciation, tax deferral, and inheritance. Wealth at that scale is not just private reward for labor. It is a compounding claim on the entire economy, backed by public law, corporate governance, financial markets, and favorable tax treatment. Reclaiming part of that claim for a universal cash floor is not alien confiscation. It is democratic rebalancing. [2][8]

There is also a political reason to prefer a visible dividend over purely abstract redistribution. The Sanders-Khanna plan is not a full UBI because households above $150,000 are excluded from the first-year payment. Still, it is broad and automatic enough to show what a near-universal cash floor could mean in practice. It converts "tax the rich" from a mood into a material institution. People do not have to infer justice from budget tables. They can feel it in a bank account. That matters in a country where legitimacy has been eroded both by elite impunity and by daily economic squeeze. A republic cannot repair itself only by promising to investigate the powerful more aggressively, though it should. It also has to reduce the private leverage that concentrated wealth exerts over ordinary life. A cash floor does that directly. [1][2] (Senator Bernie Sanders)

The deeper point is simple. A society cannot denounce elite impunity in scandal while defending elite impunity in economics. If Americans are right to resent a legal order that appears to protect people with money and connections, they should also question an economic order that leaves millions one emergency away from submission while a tiny ownership class lives beyond ordinary consequence. UBI, or a broad automatic cash floor financed by taxing extreme wealth, answers both problems at once. It reduces the coercive force of scarcity from below, and it trims the political power of concentrated wealth from above. That is why the strongest case for UBI is not sentimental. It is constitutional in spirit. No permanent class should be allowed to live above consequence, and no democratic public should be forced to live below security. [1][2][3][5] (Senator Bernie Sanders)

Works cited

[1] Sanders, Bernie. "NEWS: Sanders and Khanna Introduce Legislation to Tax Billionaire Wealth and Invest in Working Families." Senator Bernie Sanders, 2 Mar. 2026. https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/news-sanders-and-khanna-introduce-legislation-to-tax-billionaire-wealth-and-invest-in-working-families/

[2] Saez, Emmanuel, and Gabriel Zucman. PDF memorandum on Senator Sanders' billionaire wealth tax proposal. 2 Mar. 2026. https://www.sanders.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/saez-zucman-sanders2026wealthtax.pdf

[3] Herndon, Astead, and Cameron Peters. "The 'Epstein class,' explained." Vox, 2 Mar. 2026. https://www.vox.com/podcasts/480850/epstein-files-ro-khanna-accountability-congress-explained

[4] Dayen, David, and Matt Stoller. "Organized Money: The Epstein Class War." The American Prospect, 17 Feb. 2026. https://prospect.org/2026/02/17/organized-money-epstein-files-ro-khanna/

[5] Chabria, Anita. "Release the Epstein files, then get rid of the 'Epstein class'." Los Angeles Times, 13 Nov. 2025. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-11-13/chabria-column-epstein-files-california-congressmen-ro-khanna-robert-garcia

[6] Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. "Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2024, Executive Summary." 12 June 2025. https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2025-economic-well-being-of-us-households-in-2024-executive-summary.htm

[7] Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. "Distributional Financial Accounts Overview." 16 Jan. 2026. https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/efa/efa-distributional-financial-accounts.htm

[8] Gale, William G., and Ben Harris. "The difference in how the wealthy make money and pay taxes." Brookings, 7 Sept. 2023. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-difference-in-how-the-wealthy-make-money-and-pay-taxes/

[9] West, Stacia, Amy Castro Baker, Sukhi Samra, and Erin Coltrera. Preliminary Analysis: SEED's First Year. Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration, 2021. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/6039d612b17d055cac14070f/t/603ef1194c474b329f33c329/1614737690661/SEED_Preliminary%2BAnalysis-SEEDs%2BFirst%2BYear_Final%2BReport_Individual%2BPages%2B-2.pdf

[10] GiveDirectly. "Early findings from the world's largest UBI study." 6 Dec. 2023. https://www.givedirectly.org/2023-ubi-results