The 25 wealthiest Americans watched their collective fortune grow by $401 billion between 2014 and 2018. On that $401 billion in gains, they paid a federal true tax rate of 3.4 percent. Over the same years, a typical American worker paid roughly $1.60 in taxes for every $100 they earned. The richest man on the list paid $1.09. ProPublica obtained the IRS records that proved it, and the system those records describe has now been locked in for another decade.
The Record Books Keep Getting Rewritten
By 2026, the Forbes annual billionaire list counted 3,428 billionaires worldwide, a record, with a combined net worth of $20.1 trillion. That figure rose by $4 trillion in a single year. Oxfam calculated that in 2025 alone, global billionaire wealth jumped more than 16 percent to $18.3 trillion, growing three times faster than average worker wages. In the United States, 989 billionaires hold a collective fortune that has more than doubled since 2020.
Meanwhile, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in January 2026 that the median full-time worker earned $1,204 per week in 2025, or about $62,608 annually. At that income level, a single filer pays federal income tax starting at 10 percent and climbing into the 22 percent bracket. The worker's tax liability is calculated on every dollar earned. A billionaire's tax liability, under existing law, is calculated only on what they choose to sell.
Every dollar of wealth that grows but is never sold escapes federal income tax entirely, under American law as written. Stocks rise. Real estate appreciates. Private equity stakes compound. None of it counts as taxable income until a sale occurs, and the ultra-wealthy can borrow against those assets at low interest rates instead of selling, generating cash without triggering a taxable event. ProPublica documented the playbook across dozens of the country's wealthiest households.
Congress Just Made It Permanent
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law on July 4, 2026, is the policy response to five years of documented evidence that the wealthiest Americans pay a fraction of what the tax code's stated rates imply. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy analyzed the law and found that the richest 1 percent of Americans will receive $117 billion in net tax cuts in 2026 alone, an average of $66,000 per household. The middle 20 percent of earners, a group 20 times larger than the top 1 percent, will share $53 billion in cuts.
The estate tax provisions expand the exemption to $15 million per individual and $30 million per couple, at a cost of $211 billion through 2034. That provision benefits only the wealthiest 1 in 1,000 estates. The bill also reversed scheduled increases on pass-through business deductions, cutting taxes for the top 1 percent by an additional average of $27,000 per year. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities calculated that more than 70 percent of the law's net tax cuts flow to the richest fifth of Americans.
The Congressional Budget Office scored the full legislation as adding $4.7 trillion to the national deficit. The revenue to cover that gap will come from somewhere. The bill's authors also cut Medicaid, SNAP food assistance, and federal student loan programs. The arithmetic is not complicated: the gap left by untaxed billionaire wealth is filled by cutting services that working families depend on.
"The wealthiest Americans make most of their money from the rise in the value of their assets. Those gains are not defined by U.S. laws as taxable income unless and until the billionaires sell." — ProPublica, June 2021
There Are Alternatives, and Congress Knows It
In September 2025, Senate Finance Committee Ranking Member Ron Wyden, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, and Representative Don Beyer introduced the Billionaires Income Tax Act (S.2845). The bill would require individuals with more than $1 billion in assets or $100 million in annual income to pay taxes each year on the appreciation of their publicly traded assets, a system called mark-to-market taxation already used in other parts of the tax code. The Joint Committee on Taxation estimated that taxing unrealized gains of this kind would generate trillions in revenue over a decade.
The bill has not received a committee vote. The Senate majority's budget reconciliation process, the vehicle that passed the One Big Beautiful Bill, explicitly excluded any such provision. The result is a tax code that taxes a nurse's wages at 22 percent while a billionaire's stock portfolio compounds at 0 percent until the billionaire decides otherwise.
Regulated capitalism produces broad prosperity when the tax code requires those who benefit most from public infrastructure, public markets, and public order to contribute to maintaining them. When the code instead allows wealth to compound indefinitely beyond the reach of ordinary taxation, the infrastructure degrades, the services shrink, and the gap between the $20.1 trillion at the top and the $62,608 at the median grows wider each year. The One Big Beautiful Bill chose a direction. The ITEP analysis of who gets the $117 billion describes the destination.
Sources
- ProPublica: The Secret IRS Files — How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax
- ITEP: Trump Megabill Will Give $117 Billion in Tax Cuts to the Top 1% in 2026
- ITEP: Analysis of Tax Provisions in the Trump Megabill
- CBPP: By the Numbers — Harmful Republican Megabill Favors the Wealthy
- Bureau of Labor Statistics: Median Weekly Earnings Were $1,204 in 2025
- Senate Finance Committee: Wyden, Cohen, Beyer Introduce the Billionaires Income Tax Act
- Oxfam: Billionaire Wealth Jumps Three Times Faster in 2025 to Highest Peak Ever
- Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget: OBBBA Dynamic Score Comes In at $4.7 Trillion
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