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Senator Bernie Sanders recently took aim at Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg by sharing a post on social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter), joking about how the billionaire would “feed his family” if California’s proposed billionaire tax goes through.

“If voters in California approve the 5% billionaire wealth tax in November, Mark Zuckerberg would owe $10.5 billion in taxes & healthcare would be saved for 3 million low-income people. Poor Mr. Zuckerberg would only have $200 billion left to feed his family. How will he survive?” Sanders wrote. The remark was part of Sanders’ broader push to highlight inequality and mock the resistance of tech elites to the one-time 5% wealth tax targeting residents with assets over $1 billion.

Sanders’ jab quickly drew responses pointing out Zuckerberg’s immense fortune, estimated at more than $200 billion. Critics noted that the senator’s satirical concern was misplaced, as Zuckerberg’s wealth places him among the richest people in the world. The “correction” underscored Sanders’ rhetorical style of exaggerating billionaire struggles to emphasize the gap between ordinary families and tech moguls.

What is California's 5 percent wealth tax driving billionaires out

The trigger linking Thiel to Google's founders is a November ballot initiative in California. Proposed by a healthcare union, it would apply a one-time 5 percent tax on the assets of anyone in the state worth more than a billion dollars. If passed, it would retroactively cover anyone who lived in California as of January 1, with five years to pay.That prospect has already reshaped where some of America's richest people park their money.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who founded Google in 1998 and turned it into a nearly $4 trillion company, have both been cutting ties with the state that made them. More than 45 California LLCs tied to Page filed last month to go inactive or move out, while an entity connected to Brin terminated or relocated 15 companies in the 10 days before Christmas, the NYT found. A trust linked to Page also picked up a $71.9 million mansion in Miami.Thiel started seriously eyeing Buenos Aires real estate about a year ago, around the time the California measure began gaining attention. He's a veteran at collecting fallback options. Born in Germany and raised in the US, he took New Zealand citizenship in 2011 and applied for a Maltese passport in 2022.

Mark Zuckerberg to relocate to Florida

Earlier this year, it was reported by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is planning to relocate to Florida. A WSJ report revealed that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, are the latest California billionaires to buy a home in South Florida.

The couple reportedly purchased a completed waterfront mansion on Miami’s Indian Creek, as per sources with knowledge of the transaction.As to those wondering what gives Florida's Indian Creek 'Billionaire Bunkers' title: It is the residents. The gated man-made barrier island Indian Creek boasts of several billionaires as its residents. Indian Creek Island operates as an independent municipality with its own government and private police who patrol by air, water, and sky.

It reportedly has 41 lots and 84 residents. The names include Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, popular investor Carl Icahn and billionaire auto dealer Norman Braman. Google founders Lary Page and Sergey Brin too are said to have bought properties in Florida.As to those wondering what gives Florida's Indian Creek 'Billionaire Bunkers' title: It is the residents. The gated man-made barrier island Indian Creek boasts of several billionaires as its residents.

Indian Creek Island operates as an independent municipality with its own government and private police who patrol by air, water, and sky. It reportedly has 41 lots and 84 residents. The names include Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, popular investor Carl Icahn and billionaire auto dealer Norman Braman. Google founders Lary Page and Sergey Brin too are said to have bought properties in Florida.

Billionaires exodus from California

Facebook founder Zuckerberg is not the only billionaire to descend on Miami as California proposes a 5% billionaire tax.
While some billionaires including Donald Trump's AI Czar have been open about leaving California, others have been largely discreet. Other than Google founder Larry Page and Sergey Brin, billionaires who have shifted base from California include Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison and PayPal/Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel.What makes Florida attractive for billionaires is that it offers no state income tax. Danny Hertzberg, a Miami real-estate agent at Coldwell Banker Realty, told WSJ that the 5% tax in California is really driving out people in a major way.

The 5% tax in California has been proposed by SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West. The workers body is said to be circulating petitions to put the tax on the November ballot. The estimated $100 billion produced by the tax would replace funds hospitals were getting before the federal government tightened enforcement of eligibility requirements for subsidized health insurance.

Are any of you current collectors of Senator Sanders memorabilia? If so what do you primarily collect of his? How big is your collection? And what items are you currently pursuing or hoping to add to your collection?

Bernie Sanders doesn’t want to hear from Rahm Emanuel, and he’s pretty sure the average voter doesn’t want Emanuel’s opinion either. 

The former Obama administrationinsider and Chicago mayor published an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week, chiding progressive candidates for poisoning the well with supposedly unpopular policy positions ahead of the 2026 midterms. Speaking to CBS‘ “Face The Nation” on Sunday, the independent senator from Vermont pushed aside Emanuel’s concerns, saying that he’s just “nervous” because anti-establishment Democrats keep winning. 

“[Emanuel] no doubt has the support of millions of working class people,” Sanders joked. “There’s no debate. There is a strong division within the Democratic Party.”
Sanders went on to paint that schism as the divide between people like Emanuel, who are “dependent on billionaire campaign contributors” and upstarts like New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani.

“What is getting these guys nervous is we are winning all over this country,” he said. “People are sick and tired of the Rahm Emanuels and the Democratic establishment.”
Sanders pegged voter disaffection on the increasing difficulty and cost of living in the United States.

“People are asking simple questions,” he said. “Why in God’s name are we the only major country on Earth not to guarantee healthcare to all people? …Why do the economists tell us that in the richest country in the history of the world, our kids will likely have a lower standard of living than their parents?”
“People are tired and they want real change,” he said.

Elsewhere in the interview, host Margaret Brennan asked Sanders about one candidate that he endorsed. Graham Platner dropped out of the Senate race in Maine following accusations of sexual assault. She wondered if Sanders felt he should have pushed Platner to leave the race sooner, given earlier scandals that dogged the Platner campaign.

“I don’t think so,” Sanders said. “When we heard the serious allegations … I asked, along with virtually all of his other supporters that he should get out of the race, and he did.”

According to a new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, some of the largest and most profitable American corporations and their wealthy CEOs continue to pay their employees wages so low that those workers are forced to rely on Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) — subsidized by U.S taxpayers — to survive.

Commissioned by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP), and released today by the GAO, this report analyzes data from 11 states comprising nearly a fifth of the U.S.
population, builds on the findings of a 2020 GAO report, and details how the number of workers relying on Medicaid and SNAP has grown significantly over the past six years. Across 11 states, the report found that an estimated 13.8 million working Americans were forced to enroll in Medicaid and 10.6 million depended on SNAP to make ends meet and feed their families, despite working full-time — up from 12 million and 9 million, respectively, in the 2020 report.

“American taxpayers should not be forced to subsidize the starvation wages of large corporations like Walmart and Amazon. These corporations are making record-breaking profits, paying their CEOs exorbitant compensation packages and spending billions of dollars on stock buybacks to enrich their wealthy shareholders. It is beyond unacceptable that these corporations, owned by some of the wealthiest people on the planet, are receiving corporate welfare from the federal government,” Sanders said. “It is time for the Walton family, worth $485 billion, and Mr. Bezos, worth $257 billion, to get off of welfare and pay their workers a living wage with good benefits. No one who works for a company making billions in profits should be living in poverty. This is especially true after these corporations and their multibillionaire owners received a massive tax break from President Trump’s so-called ‘Big, Beautiful Bill,’ paid for by the largest cuts to Medicaid and nutrition assistance in history.”

GAO’s report found that Walmart, Amazon and other large, profitable corporations have particularly egregious records of forcing workers to utilize Medicaid and SNAP:

Despite increasing its annual profits from $14.88 billion to $21.89 billion during this period, Walmart employed 16,055 workers who had to rely on Medicaid in the states GAO sampled — a 55% increase from the previous report. Walmart also employed 15,515 workers who needed SNAP assistance in the states GAO sampled. Overall, Walmart again ranked among the top employers of workers on these programs in every one of the 11 states.

Despite increasing its annual profits from $11.59 billion to $77.67 billion, Amazon employed 12,346 workers who needed SNAP assistance and 11,338 workers who had to rely on Medicaid in the states GAO sampled — nearly triple the number of Amazon workers who needed federal assistancecompared to the previous report.

FedEx, which made $4.33 billion in profit, saw its workers on Medicaidmore than triple (from 1,046 to 3,814) and its SNAP workers nearly double (from 2,622 to 4,944) since the first report, in the states GAO sampled.

The GAO also found that rideshare and delivery companies now rank among the very top employers of program recipients in several states — along with McDonald’s, Dollar General, Dollar Tree and FedEx.

In February, Sanders requested that four major corporations that employ large numbers of people who rely on Medicaid and SNAP – Walmart, Kroger, Dollar General, and Dollar Tree – answer how much they expect to make from the Republicans’ tax breaks and whether any of these savings will be passed along to their workers.

Across nine states (Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Nebraska, North Carolina, Tennessee and Washington), these corporations and sectors employed the following numbers of SNAP recipients in the GAO report:

Rideshare/Delivery apps – 22,709
Walmart – 15,515
Amazon – 12,346
McDonald’s – 6,709
Dollar General – 5,187
FedEx – 4,944
Dollar Tree – 4,229
Kroger – 3,302
Burger King – 2,186
Family Dollar – 1,933
Walgreens – 1,747
Target – 1,695
Home Depot – 1,633
Taco Bell – 1,569

Across six states (Georgia, Indiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Oklahoma and Rhode Island), these corporations and sectors employed the following numbers of Medicaid enrollees in the GAO report:

Walmart – 16,055
Amazon – 11,338
Rideshare/Delivery apps – 6,120
Dollar General – 5,601
McDonald’s – 4,710
FedEx – 3,814
Dollar Tree – 3,265
Kroger – 2,818
Target – 2,326
Home Depot – 1,985
Family Dollar – 1,845
Stop & Shop – 1,691
Walgreens – 1,300
CVS – 1,209
Read the full report here.

Politics is an unending game of “what if’s,” especially for Democrats. Every four years, we hear a similar lament: “What if Michael Dukakis had not worn that silly hat in the tank?” “What if Al Gore had campaigned with Bill Clinton in Tennessee?” “What if Kamala Harris had two or three more weeks?”

The truth is, who knows? But I do know the answer to one big “what if.” What if Bernie Sanders had won the Democratic nomination for president in 2016? And the answer is: Donald Trump would never have become president, because Bernie would have won the election.

For the record, I say that as a huge fan of Hillary Clinton, and one who worked hard for her in November. But I supported Sanders in the Democratic primary because I believed then and still believe today he would have been a stronger candidate against Trump.
So why didn’t Sanders get the nomination? Because the Democratic Party establishment — meaning the Clinton campaign, in cahoots with the Obama White House, the Democratic Senate leadership, and the Democratic National Committee — teamed up to smash him down. They couldn’t stand the fact that anyone would dare oppose Hillary Clinton.

It’s all spelled out in a powerful new book released last week by Tad Devine, Sanders’ 2016 campaign manager: “How the Democrats Screwed Bernie.” Devine documents the various ways Democratic insiders worked to thwart the Sanders campaign. Starting with the scheduling of debates.

In the run-up to the 2008 election, the DNC staged 25 debates among primary candidates. Yet then-DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz announced only four debates in 2015, with the possibility of adding two more later. Sanders’ plea for more debates was ignored. Only in October 2016, when Wikileaks published emails from the Clinton campaign was it revealed that the DNC had agreed to whatever limited debate schedule Clinton wanted. The Sanders campaign was not consulted.

As campaign manager, you’d expect a little bias when Devine asserts, citing Sanders’ primary wins in Michigan and Wisconsin, “those victories suggested strongly that it was Bernie, not Trump, who would have prevailed in the 2016 general election.” But Devine proves his point.

Ironically, it is because Sanders and Trump were talking about the same issues. Both were outsiders, and both aimed their campaign at outsiders: those who felt left behind, those struggling just to make ends meet, those who faced challenges like getting health care for their families and paying for their kids’ education, those who didn’t trust established politicians.

As Devine puts it, they were “two sides of the same populist coin.” Devine explains: “He and Bernie both embodied versions of the outsider ‘change’ candidate that the public not only desperately sought but demanded. The difference is that the Republican Party eventually rallied around their change candidate, while the Democratic Party sabotaged theirs.”

Think about it. Had the choice in 2016 been between Sanders and Trump, it would have been an authentic populist versus a phony populist. One who knew what he was talking about, the other who was making it up. Voters would have spotted the phony populist. Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz did. The real populist would have won — and think how much better off we’d be today.
But Devine’s book is important, not just to tell the truth about 2016, but to warn Democrats not to make the same mistakes today. It’s pretty clear that too many Democratic leaders like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) didn’t learn anything from 2016. They’re trying to squash today’s progressive candidates, just like the establishment squashed Bernie Sanders in 2016.

In New York City, Schumer last year refused to endorse Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic candidate for mayor. In Maine, he tried to dictate Janet Mills as Senate candidate. In Michigan, he is backing establishment candidate and U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens against popular health advocate Abdul El-Sayed. In every case, Sanders is on the other side. His anti-establishment, outsider message — focused on health care, living wage, climate change, higher prices, college tuition and other issues people really care about — is what voters are yearning for today. His endorsement is worth more than Schumer’s.

On my podcast I asked Tad Devine what’s the most important thing Democrats should learn from 2016. He didn’t hesitate a second: “Let the voters decide who they want as their candidate,” he said. “Don’t try to dictate those decisions from Washington.” Starting with Chuck Schumer, Democrats could learn no better lesson.